Have you ever had to make changes to an electronic document only to have words or pictures jumping all over the page for no apparent reason? Drives you nuts, huh? I find that this type of behavior is often due to typing as if creating a document on a typewriter rather than using a word processor. For instance, people will hold down the space bar to get where they want to put the cursor. Sometimes this doesn’t work, so they’ll give up and press the Enter key or the Tab key, often multiple times.

So what has just happened is that the word processing program remembers every one of those keystrokes. As fast as computers are, that can be hundreds of spaces created in just a few seconds. So what looks like a blank page isn’t really blank. Luckily, most word processing programs and some text editors have a way of seeing all those hidden spaces, tabs and paragraph markers. For instance, Microsoft products use the Show/Hide function that is displayed as a paragraph symbol: ¶. Word Perfect uses the Reveal Codes command. Lotus products give you the option to Show > Hidden Characters.

Most people don’t like to create documents with every space being represented with a dot that looks like an elevated period and tabs that look like arrows, but when your document goes crazy on you, be sure to look for those non-printing characters. And remember, You Can Do It!