28th May 2001

Microsoft Word to your mother. Errant clicking can yield odd behavior in your applications, such as strange characters appearing where they shouldn't. Or at least you think they shouldn't. So, you have a funny little backwards P at the end of every paragraph you say? And the spacebar results in something other than a space? That's because you have Formatting marks turned on. If you look in your toolbar for a bigger version of that backwards P, it's likely depressed. Click it and watch all of those confusing characters vanish. The individual formatting features you'd like to display can be configured by clicking Tools - Options - View tab and selecting the items you'd like to see when you turn formatting marks on from the toolbar. The keyboard shortcut is Ctrl + * (or Ctrl + Shift + 8).