Hands on: Divide text with borders

Brian Tunbridge, using Word 2000, found that typing three asterisks between paragraphs produced a row of small squares when he hit the Return key.

This was fine in some situations, and he found he could also cut and paste the paragraph and the row of squares elsewhere in the document. However, he often found he wasn’t able to delete the row.

That is because this isn’t a row of characters or shapes, but a border – part of the preceding paragraph’s formatting. You can achieve a similar effect manually from Format, Borders and Shading by specifying a custom three-point dotted line at the bottom only.

Other triple keys also produce paragraph borders – try experimenting with the minus, underscore, equals, hash and tilde keys. If you would rather do without automatic borders, you can turn off the feature from Tools, Autocorrect, Autoformat as you type (see attached pdf).

The border button on the formatting toolbar can also prove useful in managing borders – click the little arrow beside it and you will get a palette of options.

You can drag this off the toolbar to keep it open (there’s also a Tables and Borders toolbar, but this is principally concerned with tables and their formatting). Although the palette doesn’t offer the style options of the Borders and Shading dialogue, it does have two clever memory tricks.

First it remembers the most recent border style used, so if you’ve set up a custom border in the dialogue it will use that.

Second, it remembers the latest button used, which becomes the default on the Formatting toolbar, so if you want to repeat a border action you don’t need to open the palette. I find this especially useful in removing borders.

Three centred asterisks is also a convention used in writing to denote, for example, a change of scene in a novel in the middle of a chapter.

If you want to do this without losing the automatic border feature, then remember, as with all ‘auto-business’, you can undo the border with Alt & Backspace or Control & Z, which will change the border back into three asterisks.

A better method is to put a space between the asterisks – this won’t be converted to a border and the spacing looks more professional.

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