My team's table in a Word file has suddenly developed tabs in every cell of the table. We cannot get rid of them, even manually, and we don't know how they got there.



We work with PCs, but at one point a team member worked on this file on a Mac. Could that have introduced these unwanted tabs?

How do we get rid of them?

Thanks all.

You should be able to delete tab characters easily by backspacing. If you are referring to tab custom stops (looks like the letter "L" and backwards "L" and a few other variants), just drag them off the horizontal ruler.

Note that if you want to you could post an example file in this thread and I'll have a look.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

I posted that we tried to manually get rid of the tabs -- that included backspacing. The tabs are not responsive to manual manipulation.

I wondered if some formatting had gotten affixed to the table. I went into various functions that set formatting and still no luck. The tabs are not revealed via the ruler or revealing codes.

Maybe what I'm looking at is not a tab? Maybe it's something else. There's a definite indent -- and the codes show an arrow/indent in every cell in the table. I assumed it to be a tab.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Do post an example here, if at all possible. :-)

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

Here is a screen shot of part of the Word table with Show/Hide turned on. (I replaced the real text, which is proprietary data, with xxxxxxxx.) You can see the forced indent spacing. I assumed the arrows represented tabs, but maybe something else is going on here. Again, I wonder if someone opening the file on a Mac introduced these issues -- the original file was created on a PC. Thanks in advance for the help - appreciate it.

Edited: tried to insert a screen shot, then part of the actual Word table. Screen shot won't display, and this interface doesn't show the table correctly - it doesn't show the cell contents that are the problem. How do I provide a view of the problem table?

Click the Reply to Thread button and then scroll down to the Manage Attachments button. Click the button, and then use Browse to select the file on your local disk.

Posting an actual Word file would be more helpful than an image, actually.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional