How To Remove Tab In Word

Sometimes you want to remove those tabs that indent your paragraphs. Simply in a long document, that could be a nightmare. Here are two quick solutions.

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Many Microsoft Word users insert a tab at the get-go of each paragraph. In a 1-off document, it won't usually matter, only in a document that'south oft updated, these tabs can cause trouble. Even if not, you lot might adopt cake style, which uses no indent at the first of each paragraph. Regardless of how the tabs got there, you might want to remove them. In this article, I'll show you two means to remove a tab at the kickoff of each paragraph: Supersede and a VBA process.

SEE: 83 Excel tips every user should master (TechRepublic)

I'one thousand using Microsoft 365 on a Windows 10 64-fleck organisation. (I recommend that you lot not upgrade to Windows 11 until all the kinks are worked out unless you have a specific reason for doing so.) For your convenience, y'all can download the demonstration .docm, .physician, and .cls files. Word Online doesn't support macros or the special Supersede codes.

How to remove tabs using Replace in Microsoft Word

In a long document, nobody has the time to manually delete a tab used to indent every paragraph in the certificate. Likewise beingness wearisome, information technology isn't a good use of your time. Fortunately, you can use Word's Replace feature if you know the special codes to employ:

^p represents the paragraph marking
^t represents a tab

In this example, searching for every tab using ^t alone won't work considering doing so would find every tab instead of only the tabs following a paragraph mark. Let'due south work through a quick example using the document shown in Figure A:

On the Home tab, click the Editing dropdown in the Editing group and then choose Supercede.
In the Find What command enter ^p^t.
In the Replace With control enter ^p (Figure A).
Click Supersede All.
When prompted, confirm the task (twice, if necessary).

Effigy A

We'll employ Replace to remove any tab at the beginning of a paragraph.

Every bit y'all can see, I've enabled Show/Hide (on the Home tab in the Paragraph grouping) so you lot tin can run across the tab and paragraph marks.

Figure B shows the resulting document; only one tab wasn't removed. In apparently English, this job says: When encountering a paragraph mark followed past a tab, supervene upon both characters with only a paragraph mark. The tab must be preceded by a paragraph mark. The showtime tab in the document doesn't fulfill that requirement. Manually removing that one tab doesn't seem so bad when you realize you lot're not deleting dozens or even hundreds of tabs manually.

Figure B

The Replace task removed all the tabs only ane.

If this doesn't work for you, click the More than push button and replace the manually entered codes using the Special button. Sometimes Discussion is a fleck finicky and won't evaluate codes entered via the keyboard. The simply real limitation is remembering how to correctly use the codes. If y'all're supporting users who might not have this skill, you can provide a VBA sub procedure instead.

How to remove tabs using VBA in a Discussion certificate

If requiring users to remember how to use Replace in this fashion is request a chip too much, provide them with a VBA solution. All they accept to remember to practise is run the procedure, and you can add together it to a group on the ribbon or the Quick Admission Toolbar (QAT) making admission quick and easy. List A is the sub procedure we'll employ.

Listing A
Sub RemoveTabs()

'Remove all tabs following a paragraph mark.

'Removes tabs used to indent paragraphs.

Option.Find.ClearFormatting

Selection.Observe.Replacement.ClearFormatting

With Selection.Observe

.Text = "^p^t"

.Replacement.Text = "^p"

.Frontward = True

.Wrap = wdFindContinue

.Format = False

.MatchCase = Fake

.MatchWholeWord = False

.MatchWildcards = Faux

.MatchSoundsLike = False

.MatchAllWordForms = False

Finish With

Selection.Find.Execute Supercede:=wdReplaceAll
Stop Sub

To enter the procedure, press Alt + F11 to open the Visual Basic Editor (VBE). In the Project Explorer to the left, select ThisDocument, every bit shown in Figure C. You tin can enter the code manually or import the downloadable .cls file. In addition, the macro is in the downloadable .docm, .doc, and .cls files. If you enter the lawmaking manually, don't paste from this web page. Instead, re-create the code into a text editor and and so paste that lawmaking into the ThisDocument module. Doing then will remove whatsoever phantom web characters that might otherwise cause errors.

Figure C

Afterward entering the procedure, return to the document. If you are using a ribbon version, be sure to relieve the workbook as a macro-enabled file. If you lot're working in the menu version, y'all can skip this step.

If you're using the sit-in file, y'all might want to press Ctrl + Z to disengage the tab deletes from the last section so y'all tin run into the procedure remove them. To run the process, click the Developer tab. In the Lawmaking group, click Macros. In the resulting dialog, select RemoveTabs (Figure D) and click Run. At present, you won't want to enquire users to work quite this hard to run this procedure. To learn how to add the procedure to a custom grouping on the ribbon or the QAT, read How to add Function macros to the QAT toolbar for quick access.

Figure D

Whether you employ Supercede or the VBA process, remember that neither volition find that first tab in the document. However, it should find all the other instances of a tab following a paragraph mark. If you're uncertain, you might click Replace and Side by side for a few instances until you feel more comfortable replacing them all at the same time.