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Microsoft Word 2016 Bootcamp - Zero to Hero Training

How to use tabs in Microsoft Word 2016

Daniel Walter Scott || VIDEO: 35 of 52

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Hi there, Word people, in this tutorial we're going to look at tabs, we're going to do something looking like this, and we're going to learn all the ins and outs, and we're going to learn why they are a bit of a pain in the neck, and how to get around that. Let's go and do it.

First up, we're going to go and bring in the text, you can just type yours in. So I'm going to go to 'File', 'Open', and on my 'Desktop' there's one called 'Word Exercise Files', there's one called '03 Long Document', let's open up 'Tabs', and we'll use that content. I'm going to 'copy' this, I’m going to 'close' it down, and inside of here I'm going to put a 'return', and 'paste' him in.

So this is bringing in just a bit of text, there's no tabs, if you've opened the document, or being sent a document that already has tabs, and things are going horribly wrong, what you might have to do is-- what might make it easier to see what you're doing is, under 'Home', up the top here, there's this one here called 'Show/Hide'. 'Click' on that, and it just shows you all the invisible features of a Word document. This icon here indicates that there's a return, and you can see the little dots between words, and what you might see is that there's a bunch of tabs in between, that's what a tab looks like, this little arrow here. So you might have to go through, maybe just clean them up, or, just say you're aware of where they are.

What I'm going to do in this course is I'm going to put a 'tab' between name, duration, and cost. Then I'm going to go between 'JumpStart', I'll put a 'tab' to one month, and cost, so it's going to be the name 'JumpStart', and the duration's one month, and the cost is $9. Do the same for the next line. So 'BootCamp', and the next one is going to be '12 Months', and then the price. So I’m going to turn these ‘invisibles’ off, we should only have one between the line, don't use multiple tabs to push content out, just causes trouble.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select all of you guys. By default Word's given me my first tab. The default, normally there's a half inch between them all, but this one here has jumped out and given me my first tab, this guy here. You can see, I can start dragging him along, and then the next one's automatic. If you don't have that first tab it's going to try and automatically do it, and it looks kind of horrible, so often, the new version of Word will at least put in one for you, and that's this little 'L' for left align, or consider that at least.

So I got this first one. What I want to do is just click and drag it. If you end up clicking and dragging somewhere close, but not there, and things are going wrong, it means you've kind of put in an extra tab, so to get rid of this extra tab-- I don't want it, I'm going to click, hold, and just drag it off. Even then I didn't get it. Click and drag off to down here into no man's land, you can see, it deletes. I've got my first tab, be sure to click on it properly, and I'm going to decide where it's going to go, so I'm going to decide it comes across a little bit further. This is my first tab.

My second tab doesn't exist here, I'm going to click in here, you can see, wherever I click it aligns up with. You can see, I can move him along, oops, got the wrong one again, it's very hard to click on these guys. 

So those are my tabs. I can go and adjust-- things that I want to adjust at least is that I want to adjust these ones here, because I want them to align on the decimal point, I don't want them to-- at the moment, they’re aligning left align, which is cool, but I want to align on the decimal point, so what I'm going to do is, I'm going to click on these two, I'm not going to highlight that first one, why, because I want the decimal point to align, I don’t want the word cost to align because it doesn't have a decimal point, so I'm going to select on these, and up the top here, at the moment it's left aligned, I can double click on it. Now remember, it's really hard to double click on this thing, so be very careful where your cursor is, and then squint at it, get it really good, and double click it. I got this.

It says I've got two tab positions, there's this first one, which is this one here, at 1.13 inches, and then there's this second one. This first one here is the left align, perfect, the second one, I would like to be decimal point. Click 'OK'. It just means that-- you can see, wherever this is, it's aligning with the decimal point. I'm going to drag him over a little bit, just to fit in with the 'Cost'. 

So that's how to create-- so first of all you want to make sure you've only got one tab between things. So by turning on your 'invisibles', just to check, and then you can go do an adjustment by clicking anywhere up here, just be careful that you don't add an extra tab, we don't need them. I can tell by selecting all this, I got one tab, and a second tab, and that's my decimal point tab. To adjust them, it's to double click them. And you can change the left align, in this case, to a decimal point.

Now in saying that, I find tables are a lot easier to use, but we need to learn all of the things that Word can do, and all the things that will be thrown at you as a Word user. 

Let's leave that there, and let's go on to our next video.