Formatting poems in Word 2010

[Microsoftenquirer1000]

I have copied and pasted some poems onto Word 2010. The trouble is, at the end of the line of a poem, the text carries on onto the next line but the beginning was indented. So it looks like this:



Text text text text text text
text text text

I would prefer it to look like this;

Text text text text text text
text text text

or this:

Sorry it did not come out how I typed it. What I mean is, the beginning of the poem lines were indented and the end were not

Text text text text text text
text text text

[macropod]

Hi Microsoftenquirer,

You should be able to fix that by changing the paragraph formatting. At present you seem to have it set up with first-line indenting. You need to delete that and use the required indenting for the whole paragraph. See under Paragraph > Indents and Spacing.

[teshurtz]

My guess is your real problem is is that you are using an enter to go to a new line even though it is not the end of the poem. this makes word think it is a new paragraph. instead you can use a shift+enter (hold shift and hit enter). this is a carriage return (think type writer when it needs to go back to the beginning of a new line) or something like that. if you turn on formatting symbols (hold ctrl and shift and hit the */8 key) you will see a paragraph symbol at the end of each line where an enter was used. with the carriage return you see an arrow (like the symbol on the enter key). this means it starts a new line but not a new paragraph.

this is also a great thing to use if you are using justified alignment and need to start a new line. if you just hit enter it will make the last line left aligned as you are telling it it is the end of a paragraph, however if you enter a carriage return it leaves the previous line justified.