Horizontal Borders/Dividers Using the Keyboard
Do you find yourself constantly drawing horizontal lines in MS Word? You know, using the drawing toolbar to draw lines as borders or dividers, in order to give your document a little extra pizzazz.
Are you tired of all the mouse work involved in the drawing toolbar? You know, turning on the line tool, drawing the line and then changing the style.
Wish you had a faster way?
Maybe you’d like a way that involves only the keyboard?
Well, if that sounds good to you, I have a quick list of divider/border line options that only take four keystrokes to accomplish.
Ready to find out how?
Good! Here they are.
Now, here’s the really cool part. Once the line is drawn, you can use your mouse to move it up and down to alter its distance from the surrounding text. (You can’t move it all over the place, but it is enough to let you have some flexibility in regards to the line’s position near the text).
Simply run your mouse cursor over the line, slowly, until it becomes a double-sided arrow (pointing up and down). Once you have that arrow, click and hold the left mouse button. Next, drag the line up or down as needed.
Note: If this trick isn’t working for you, you should check to make sure you have this option turned on. To do this, you need to go to the Tools menu, AutoCorrect choice. Then under the AutoFormat As You Type tab, make sure the Borders box is checked in the “Apply as you type” section of the window. Click OK when you’re finished.
Now, moving on.
What about the “Oops Factor?”
You know, the line you now need to remove.
It can be a bit of a pain if you don’t know what to do. Sometimes it’s not as easy as simply hitting the backspace or delete keys.
What you’ll need to do is highlight the text around the divider line so that you have the border contained in the highlight, like this:
Now, go to the Format menu, Borders and Shading choice.
Once there, go to the Borders tab.
Make sure the None box is selected (top of the left hand column) and click OK.
Poof! The line is gone!
That’s it. Divider lines with just four keystrokes. Go ahead, jazz it up!
~ April