How To Set A Right Tab In Word

E'er have a document that needs to have a paragraph like this?

I usually achieve this play tricks (having left- and right-justified text on the same line) in Microsoft Word with Tables.  For me, tables make a lot of alignment problems a lot easier.  Here, I'll plough on the gridlines (on the Table Tools | Layout tab that comes upward whenever your cursor is in a table) and show you:

Pretty straightforward if you lot're use to Tables in Microsoft Discussion.  The left column is left-justified, and the right column is right-justified.  Piece of cake-peasy … if you know how.

But non everyone's comfortable with Tables in Word.  And because there's always (okay, nearly always) more than one way to accomplish the same goal in any Microsoft Office awarding, hither'southward another alternative: Right Tabs:

See that right-pointing arrow between the date and the dollar amount (I've got Show/Hide turned on so you can see the codes)?  That's a correct tab I gear up up at the six.5″ mark (on an 8.5″ wide sheet of paper with one″ margins on both sides, 6.v″ would be the right margin).  I typed the date, gear up the right tab, and started typing the corporeality at the right-mitt margin.

Permit me back up and explicate a scrap.

With regular tabs, you're moving the cursor over and beginning your typing at that point.  This results in the left edges of your tab stops beingness aligned (if you're using tabs to, say, type in columnar data), like then:

Run across how the left edges of each of those columns lines up?  Those are left tabs.  And that'due south what y'all get by default when y'all press the Tab primal.

Sometimes, though, y'all demand for the data to line up on the right-manus side:

For this instance, I set a left tab at 1.0″ (for the Date of Rent column, since information technology starts 1″ from the margin) and a correct tab at the 3.5″ betoken (the correct-paw edge of the Position Title column) then that data would line upward forth the right side rather than the left.

Hither'southward the step-past-step for setting up the tab stops:

1.  Start, I brought up the Paragraph Format dialog box past clicking on the pointer in the lower right-hand corner of the Paragraph section of the Home tab:

two.  Then, I clicked on the Tabs button in the lower left-hand corner of the Paragraph dialog box above to bring up the Tabs dialog box:

iii.  The above is what the default settings wait similar.  First, I typed 1.0 in the Tab Terminate Position field in the upper left, chose Left in the Alignment section in the centre, then clicked the Set button.  That set upward the left tab for the Date of Hire column.

4.  Next, I typed iii.v into the Tab Stop Position field, chose Correct in the Alignment department in the middle (to get a right tab this time instead of left), and clicked the Set button again.

5.  In one case I set those two tabs, the dialog box looked like this:

Now all that'due south left is to blazon the information into the corresponding columns: typing the surname first, hitting the Tab fundamental to go to the Hire Date column at the 1-inch mark and typing a date, and then striking the Tab key once again to bring the cursor to the iii.5-inch mark to begin typing the Position Title.

Yous'll observe, equally you showtime typing in the third cavalcade with the right tab, that your letters move to the left to keep the alignment of the column on the right.  Don't freak out — once you press the Return cardinal and begin typing the next line, everything volition be fine.

If you find that, once yous get further in your certificate, you need to restore the default tab stops (say, for paragraph indentation), you can get back into the Tabs dialog box and click the Clear All button.  This will clear your custom Tabs from that point forward, restoring the document'south default tabs (or allowing yous to re-set up some other Tab stops as appropriate).

What sort of documents would you use Right Tabs in?  Let me know in the comments below.

Source: https://legalofficeguru.com/right-tabs-in-word/

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