Show or Hide Formatting Marks in Word (¶ Symbols)

To show or hide formatting marks in Word, click the ¶ button in the Paragraph group on the Home tab, or press Ctrl+Shift+8 (Command+8 on a Mac). The pilcrows at the end of each paragraph and the dots between words are not part of your text. They are screen-only marks, so they never print and never appear in a PDF. The two problems people actually run into are the opposite of each other: marks that stay on screen after the button is off, and documents sent to customers with empty paragraphs, hidden text or tracked changes that nobody saw because the marks were off. This guide covers both.

Turn formatting marks on or off

The ¶ button is Show/Hide ¶, and it toggles: click once to show, again to hide. Ctrl+Shift+8 does the same thing (the 8 on the top number row; on a US keyboard this is Ctrl+*).

The setting belongs to your copy of Word, not to the document. Turn it off once and every document opens without marks; a colleague opening the same file sees it according to their own setting. So when someone says "the file you sent is full of ¶ symbols", nothing in the file needs fixing. They just need to press Ctrl+Shift+8.

What each formatting mark means

A dotted line labeled Page Break comes from Ctrl+Enter or Insert > Page Break. A double dotted line labeled Section Break with a type in parentheses, such as Next Page, is a section break from Layout > Breaks. Section breaks hold the orientation, margins and headers of the section before them, so deleting one merges two sections' layouts; don't remove one just because it's visible.

When marks stay after you turn them off

Some marks are set to always show

Microsoft's article on formatting marks explains that File > Options > Display has a list called Always show these formatting marks on the screen: tab characters, spaces, paragraph marks, hidden text, optional hyphens and object anchors, each with its own checkbox. Anything checked there stays visible whatever the ¶ button says. If tab arrows or space dots won't go away, clear them in that list.

Dotted cell borders and a grid behind the page

Dotted lines around a table with no borders are table gridlines (Table Layout > View Gridlines). A faint grid across the whole page is View > Gridlines. Neither prints.

Colored underlines, strikethrough and margin balloons

Colored text, strikethrough and balloons in the margin are not formatting marks; they are Track Changes. Turn tracking off with the Track Changes button on the Review tab, and clear existing changes with Accept or Reject. Switching the view to Simple Markup or No Markup only hides changes on your screen. They stay in the file, and the recipient can display them again.

A dotted underline under words

A fine dotted underline marks hidden text. By default, hidden text is visible only while formatting marks are on, so turning them off makes it look deleted when it is still in the file. Select the text and open the Font dialog (Ctrl+D); the Hidden box under Effects will be checked. If Print hidden text is off in File > Options > Display, it won't print either, which means only someone who opens the Word file and shows formatting marks will see it.

Corner marks, red squiggles and other screen-only lines

The small L-shaped marks at the corners of the text area are crop marks, and a dotted rectangle around the text is text boundaries. Both are under File > Options > Advanced > Show document content. Red wavy underlines are spelling flags and blue double underlines are grammar flags; if product codes and customer names are flagged everywhere, use Hide spelling errors in this document only in File > Options > Proofing. None of these print.

Use formatting marks to find layout problems

When the spacing between paragraphs is uneven or a blank page appears, turn the marks on before anything else. A run of ¶ marks means someone used empty paragraphs for spacing. A labeled dotted line means a break. To see every break at once, switch to View > Draft, which shows text continuously with each break drawn across the full width.

If there are no empty paragraphs and no breaks, the gap is paragraph spacing. Check Spacing After on the Layout tab, or Before and After in the Paragraph dialog. Spacing set this way travels with its paragraph, so it never leaves a stray empty line at the top of a page the way extra Enters do.

A small black square points to the Line and Page Breaks tab of the Paragraph dialog. Page break before forces the paragraph onto a new page; Keep with next on several paragraphs in a row moves the whole block to the next page together and leaves the previous page short.

Clean up marks with Find and Replace

Once you know which mark is the problem, Ctrl+H fixes every instance at once. Type these codes in Find what, or pick them from More > Special:

• ^p is a paragraph mark. Replace ^p^p with ^p and repeat to collapse runs of empty paragraphs.
• ^l is a manual line break. Text copied from a web page or an email often has Shift+Enter breaks on every line, so the whole block behaves as one paragraph. Replace ^l with ^p to split it into real paragraphs.
• ^t is a tab, useful when cleaning up columns lined up with tabs and spaces.
• ^m is a manual page break. Replace with nothing to remove them all.

Rows of space dots used to line text up show immediately with marks on. That alignment breaks as soon as the font changes, so replace it with tabs or indents. Use Find Next on the first few matches before Replace All, so you see what is about to change.

Worked example: checking a spec sheet before it goes out

Crestview Foods' sales operations coordinator is about to send a product specification sheet to Brightway Retail. Quality and production both edited the file with Track Changes on, and a few lines of internal cost notes were formatted as hidden text during the pricing review. With formatting marks off, the document looked clean.

1. Ctrl+Shift+8 showed six ¶ marks in a row at the end of page 3, which had pushed the page 4 table onto the next page. Deleting them and adding Spacing Before to the table title fixed the layout.
2. A dotted underline on page 2 showed a hidden note: "Room for 3% on price." It was deleted.
3. On the Review tab, all remaining changes were accepted and Track Changes was turned off.
4. File > Info > Check for Issues > Inspect Document ran next. As Microsoft's Document Inspector guide describes, it finds comments and revisions, document properties and personal information, hidden text and invisible content in one pass. It found one more hidden line that step 2 had missed. Removed data can't always be restored, so it was run on a copy.
5. With the Navigation Pane open, the coordinator stepped through each heading to make sure no table was split mid-page and no heading sat alone at the bottom of a page.

6. Formatting marks off, saved as PDF, checked, sent.

With the marks off, two lines of internal pricing notes and the whole edit history would have gone to the customer. Three minutes with the ¶ button on prevented it.

👉 How to Delete a Blank Page in Word That Won't Go Away

Version differences

Microsoft 365 and Word 2016, 2019, 2021 and 2024 have the ¶ button in the same place and the same shortcut. Word for the web has a Show/Hide ¶ button on the Home tab too. In Word for Mac, press Command+8, and choose always-visible marks under Word > Preferences > View.

FAQ

Q. Will the ¶ marks print if I leave them on?

No. Formatting marks are screen-only and never appear on paper or in a PDF.

Q. I turned off ¶ but the dots or arrows are still there.

They are checked under Always show these formatting marks on the screen in File > Options > Display. Clear them and they follow the ¶ button again.

Q. Why do I see the marks but my colleague doesn't?

The setting is stored in each person's copy of Word, not in the file. Press Ctrl+Shift+8 to turn yours off.

Q. What should I check before sending a Word file outside the company?

Show formatting marks to find empty paragraphs and hidden text, accept or reject remaining tracked changes, then run Inspect Document to catch comments, personal information and hidden text you missed.

How inline AI prepares documents to send

inline AI opens the Word file you're about to send, removes empty paragraphs, stray breaks, leftover tracked changes and hidden text, and saves a clean PDF. When a folder holds spec sheets for several customers, it runs the same check on every file in one request.