Sometimes you need to insert special characters into your ms, but these aren’t like the Symbols we discussed before…these are mostly invisible. Yes, invisible, yet very important.
Note: If you haven’t made non-printing characters visible yet, now would be a good time to do so. Remember, the keyboard shortcut is Ctrl-Shift-* and you’ll see the pilcrow highlighted in the Paragraph group on the Home tab.
The first character is one that you’ve used hundreds of time but probably never thought about: The Paragraph Break. You get this invisible character by simply hitting the Enter key, which you do at the end of every paragraph. With non-printing characters visible, it looks just like the pilcrow on the button above: ¶ (Note: Stored inside this one character is a bunch of formatting info.)
Next is the Line Break. It is used when you want to end a line, but not start a new paragraph. It looks like a small arrow with a hook: ↵ and you enter it with Shift-Enter.
Then there’s the Column Break. Useful if you have a multi-column section and the text in the columns doesn’t break where you want. It shows as a bunch of dots with the words Column Break in the middle. You can enter it by typing Ctrl-Shift-Enter.
Finally, there is the Page Break. It forces the next text onto a new page. It looks similar to the Column Break, but the dots are a bit tighter. You can put it in your document with Ctrl-Enter.
Three more: first another invisible one, then one that’s half visible, and finally a fully visible one.
The invisible one is a space…but it’s a special kind of space: a Non-breaking Space. You’d use it between a title and a name, such as “Dr. Smith”, so it stays together, not coming apart if it falls near the end of a line. It shows as a small circle instead of the regular dot used for a normal space, and you type it with Ctrl-Shift-Space.
Now the half visible one. It’s an Optional Hyphen. If you have a word that might break in the wrong place at the end of a line, you can tell Word exactly where you want the word to break. In the first example to the right, the word “elements” breaks in a strange place, so we put an Optional Hyphen right before the ‘m’ as shown in the second example. In the third, you can see the Optional Hyphen before the ‘m’ because it’s not being used, so it shows as ¬ and is entered with Ctrl-Hyphen.
Finally the fully visible character we promised. This one combines the Non-breaking Space and the Optional Hyphen, creating a Non-breaking Hyphen! If you have a hyphenated word that you want to keep together, not allowing it to break at all when near the end of a line, then you’d use a non-breaking hyphen. When you have non-printing characters turned on, it looks like a skinny dash, but just a normal hyphen when off—entered by Ctrl-Shift-Hyphen.
That covers all the special characters we are going to do this time…we’ll get to Dashes later.