how can I get format painter to format paragraphs?

[Carol]

I am following the directions for format painter, but I cannot get it to
format my paragraphs to just one tab indentation. (At some point, without me
doing anything, my computer arbitrarily double tabbed on some of my
paragraphs. I would like all my paragraphs to have just one indentation
without having to manually go back and delete the extra indentation.)

The process I have tried to use: I highlighed a paragraph with the correct
indentation, then clicked on format painter, then highlighted the incorrect
paragraph. Nothing changes. Likewise if I double click on format painter
and try to do several pages of the document. Thanks for any help you can
give me. Carol

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

When you say "double tabbed", are there in fact two tab characters? Press
Ctrl+Shift+* to toggle non-printing characters on if they're not already
displayed. Tab characters look like a little arrow that points to the right.

If you have actual tab characters... my own preference would be do
accomplish indentation using first-line indent settings, rather than with
tabs. Be that as it may... if you prefer tabs, then try deleting the extra
tabs. Assuming you never want to have two consecutive tabs with no
intervening characters, you could also do this using Find/Replace as
follows:

Find what:^t^t
Replace with:^t

Choose Replace All. This will replace all two-tab occurrences with a single
tab.

The ^t token is the special search symbol that Word uses to match tabs. By
"^t", I don't mean press Ctrl+t. I mean type a caret (^) followed by a
lowercase t: ^t.

Herb Tyson MS MVP
Author of the Word 2007 Bible
Blog: http://word2007bible.herbtyson.com
Web: http://www.herbtyson.com