Get rid of that annoying horizontal line in Word

Have you had this happen? It especially likes to rear its irritating head in other people's documents that you receive.

I am talking about a mysterious horizontal line that appears in the middle of your Word document, like I had recently in a document I was working on. In this case, I had scanned the page in, and the optical character recognition (OCR) program had put it in there itself.


It's not a regular line, drawn with the graphic tools, you can't find any option for it in the menus, right-clicking on it does nothing, and when you pass the mouse over, it merely gives you the slider pointer icon, used to indicate that you can move it up and down.

Well, no need to tear your hair out! This line is actually... Wait for it...! A border! Don't ask me how it got there, but all you need to do is highlight the section around the line (just left mouse, and pull a nice big block round the area, provided there are no tables nearby where you want to preserve a border). Then just go up to the border-line selection icon in the toolbar and choose the one that clears all borders:

Hey presto (I say that a lot round here!), that pesky line should disappear! If it doesn't then, well, blame aliens!

Highlight any square block of text in Word using ALT

Now this tip is really nice, almost like magic if you have never used it before!

Normally when you use the mouse to highlight text, it will automatically highlight sentences and paragraphs across the screen, like this:

But you don't want it to do that, especially in a case like this, where you have two columns separated with tabs (though this is not the best way to format this text!!). You want to select a square block which will, say, only highlight one vertical strip of text, like this:

This is easy to do! Just press ALT and hold it down, then select using the left mouse button like you normally would. You will find that instead of Word "snapping" to words and whole lines, it will highlight a rectangular section of any size and dimensions you want, as in the picture above! Then you can copy and paste just the vertical section you have anywhere you want.

You can even cut a section right out of the middle of a text. Say, from the above paragraph, like so:

Just press ALT and hold it do

mally would. You will find th

will highlight a rectangular se

ure above! Then you can copy

I am sure you would know why you wanted to do that! This tip is incredibly useful though - yet another Word Tip from Word Tips World, designed to get you up there with the pros! Be sure to let us know if you found this tip useful, and what you used it for!