How to force tabs to be consistent

[PatrickYork]

Hi,

I have an extremely long document, 90% of which is formatted using the Normal style. I would have thought that this would mean that all this text would be formatted identically; however, I have just noticed that if I put the cursor in different places in the document, I see the following:

• Some places have no tab stops at all displayed on the ruler.
• Some places have multiple regularly-spaced tab stops on the ruler.

I only ever use one tab (to begin a paragraph) and the result of this is that some paragraphs have the first line tabbed to 1.27cm, while some have the first line starting at 2cm.

I have never knowingly set or removed any tab stops, and so I am completely confused about where these different tabs have come from. But much more importantly, can anyone suggest how I might force the tabs throughout the whole document to be consistent? I could Select All and then set tabs, but that would remove the proper formatting from the 10% of the document that does not have the Normal style.

This is really frustrating, and will be a huge amount of work to sort out unless anyone can suggest a good way to sort this out. Any advice would be very much appreciated.

Kind wishes, Patrick