Troubleshoot text formatting

Document protection for formatting may be turned on. When formatting is restricted with this feature, you can format text only by applying a specific selection of styles. To view the styles that are available, click Styles and formatting on the Formatting toolbar.

Note  If you know the password to remove document protection, click Unprotect Document on the Tools menu, and then type the password in the Password box.

If clicking Show/Hide on the Standard toolbar does not hide text that is formatted as hidden, then Microsoft Word has been set to display hidden text. Try the following:

• On the Tools menu, click Options, and on the View tab, clear the Hidden text check box.

Although you can't underline a blank line or a space by using the Underline button on the Formatting toolbar, there are several other ways to get the result you want:

• Add a border to the bottom edge of the paragraph that the blank line or space is in.
• Type nonbreaking spaces (CTRL+SHIFT+SPACEBAR) where you want the underline to appear. Then select the spaces and click Underline on the Formatting toolbar. This works because nonbreaking spaces are characters, not just spaces.
• Place the insertion point where you want the underline to begin, and then press SHIFT+HYPHEN, which inserts the underscore character.

When you underline text and then apply subscript formatting to a portion of the text, you may find that the underline formatting of the two types of text isn't aligned.

Instead of applying underline formatting to the text, you can draw a line under the text. To do this, click Line on the Drawing toolbar. To keep the line horizontal, hold down the SHIFT key as you draw.

Animated text effects that you create in Microsoft Word won't appear when you save the document as a Web page and then open it in a Web browser. However, you can still view your font animations from a Web page. Save your document in Word Document format, and then create a hyperlink from the Web page to the document.

If you select all the text in a paragraph except the paragraph mark, and then change the character formatting of the selected text, Microsoft Word also applies the new character formatting to the paragraph mark. Then, when you press ENTER to begin a new paragraph, the new character formatting is carried over into the text of all subsequent paragraphs. This occurs because a paragraph's formatting is contained in the paragraph mark that precedes the paragraph.

To format all of the text in a paragraph but not the paragraph mark and subsequent paragraphs, first select the text you want to format, and then apply the character formatting to the text. Then, select the paragraph mark and press CTRL+SPACEBAR. This removes character formatting from the paragraph mark, so when you begin a new paragraph, the paragraph mark does not contain the character formatting.

Tip

The font may be unavailable on your computer or printer. You can change the font that Microsoft Word substitutes for the unavailable font.

1. On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Compatibility tab.
2. Click Font Substitution.
3. Under Font substitutions, click the missing font name under Missing document font.
4. In the Substituted font box, click another font.