How do I insert a horizontal bar in Word?

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How do I insert a horizontal bar in Word?

Anonymous

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Answer 1

Pesach has explained how to do this with an automatic border. You can also apply borders manually, using the button in the Paragraph group on the Home tab. Click the button beside the border button (ignoring whatever sort of border it's currently displaying as the default) and choose Borders and Shading... from the menu to open the Borders dialog.

In addition to the various types of borders you can add, note the Horizontal Line button in the lower left corner. This allows you to insert a graphic element (prepare to be patient, as the preview sometimes takes a moment to populate). The "lines" displayed are all the clip art pictures that include the keyword "dividers." If you have a specific design in mind, you can check the box for "Include content from Office Online" and search. My search for "vine leaf" included a lot of graphics that are not dividers but some that would make acceptable ones.

Answer 2

Hi Ryan,

By default the automatic generation of border lines is enabled. If you haven't disabled it, Word automatically creates six different types of border lines that stretch across the page when you type a hyphen (-), the underscore character (_), an equal sign (=), a tilde (~), the pound sign (#), or an asterisk (*) three or more times at the beginning of a new line with nothing before, between, or after these characters and then press Enter. The hyphen, underscore character, equal sign, and pound sign create bars of various thickness. You can see examples of these lines on my website at http://www.makeofficework.com/mysterious_behavior.htm#lines along with instructions for getting rid of such lines when they are not wanted.

Hope this helps,

Pesach

Answer 3

I learned how to do this with *** and ### on accident--I was using three symbols to indicate a new section, and ended up with lines across the page. That was okay, I thought. But now I have a 240-page document with dozens of these horizontal bars, and most of cannot be deleted! The only ones that I have been able to delete are the ones at the very top of the inside of a table cell--by deleting all text above a horizontal bar and positioning the cursor at an empty line (the invisible paragraph symbol) and hitting "delete," I can delete the bar.

But the ones in the middle of text, and the ones that are not inside a table cell, I cannot delete!

I have been copying & pasting my text from one document into another a few paragraphs at a time, but the problem is that when I copy (say) all 23 paragraphs in a section WITHOUT the bar, then paste it, the bar appears in the other document. I try copying all but the last two or three words, and that USUALL works but not always. In these cases, I have tried copying only (say) 22 paragraphs, but when I paste it--the bar still shows up t the bottom of the second document.

These things are recalcitrant! How can I get rid of them?

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How do I insert a horizontal bar in Word?

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