Clear tabs!

Question

If the clear all the tab stops does not in fact clear all the tab stops, just the user defined stops, why dont you tell people this? It is irritating when you use a feature lilke "Clear all tab stops" and find that it does not clear all the tab stops!

Answer 1

Hi @Julian Pereira

A tab stop is the location where the cursor stops after the Tab key is pressed. If needed, you may press Ctrl + A to select entire document, go to Tabs interface, set the Default tab stops size as "0" before clearing.

If you click "Clear All" tab stops in the document, all paragraphs will be to their "pristine" state where only default tabs are in place.

Please note, this way wont's remove Tab characters, they remain in your document.

If you want to remove tab characters, please use Find and Replace (Ctrl + H). Then search for ^t (which is the tab character) and replace it with nothing or, if appropriate for your document, with a single space.

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Answer 2

I'm afraid that nobody here can answer "why" questions. Only Microsoft will be able to do that and they usually don't explain their design decisions.

Your observation is correct, of course: all Word documents have tab stops. When you define a custom tab stop, the default ones to the left of your custom tab stop will be cleared. The ones on the right remains (unless there are more custom tab stops further to the right already).