Creating page breaks using the pilcrow

I ran into an interesting problem a while ago where I needed to explain to an Apple Mac user how to begin each chapter on a new page in a report using page breaks: and why inserting page breaks is necessary.

Once upon a time, to finish a paragraph on a typewriter, we would enter a hard return (i.e. "Enter" on the keyboard). To end a page or a chapter, we would take that page out of the machine, and start typing on a fresh page. The same principles apply with PCs. To finish a paragraph we enter a hard return; to create a new page or chapter we enter a page break.

If we toggle on the Pilcrow - or paragraph mark - icon in Word (that's the one that looks like this: ¶), we will suddenly see all the hidden printer codes. Check out the following sentence:

Codes on and codes off

Codes·on·and·codes·off·¶

What is this "pilcrow"? Well, in an early clear definition of what the pilcrow is appears as "Formerly [...] they used this Figure ¶ termed a Pilcrow, and by the Printers, Paragraph" (Simpson & Weiner, 1989, p. 190, citing Miege, 1691, p. 126). A pilcrow is a diacritical - aka letter short code - for 'paragraph'. Just as a "." is a diacritical for a full stop; a "," is a comma, etc (read more on diacriticals here). Decker reports that the Pilcrow is apparently also known as the "alinea" (2023), but I was unable to find "alinea" in the Oxford English Dictionary.

So, to come back to our topic, why do we need to worry about putting in page breaks? In the documents that we view on our own screen, what appears to be the start of a new chapter - effectively a page break - is not necessarily what it seems. Depending on our screen resolution, our printer set up, and our default paper size, what seems to be a new page or chapter may well be simply the fortuitous end to a run of text.

When we open our document on another machine, the document will be repaginated according to the current machine settings, shifting page layouts. To make matters worse, some users do not understand that popping in a few hard returns - Enter Enter Enter etc - to move the text down to the next page is not the equivalent of a page break. On a long document on a different machine, text for a new page may turn up at the bottom of a page.

Inserting a page or chapter break in Word is super easy. Just key "Ctrl & Enter" on the keyboard. We can check that we have inserted a page break by toggling on the Pilcrow. We will see the following printer code:

·······················page break·······················¶

Toggle off, and we see merely our text once more. This is very handy to ensure that our documents are formatted just as we would like them to be. And those page breaks should not change when opening the document on a new machine.

Sam

References:

Custom Guide. (2021). Page Break in Word: How to Add and Remove Page Breaks in Word. https://www.customguide.com/word/page-break-in-word

Decker, E. (2023, March 30). 3 Ways to Remove Paragraph Symbol (¶) in Word. https://techcult.com/remove-paragraph-symbol-%C2%B6-in-word/

Simpson, J. A., & Weiner, E. S. C. (Ed.) (1989). Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed., Vol XI Ow-Poisant). Clarendon Press.

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Word codes for Find and Replace

I use Word a lot for editing text. I often import scanned text into Word, and - because importing text rarely results in clean formatting - sometimes I need to clean up the text a bit. 

That is when using Find and Replace can be very helpful. While I have written on this topic before (here), there is always something else we can add.

In that earlier post, I explained how we can find and replace a hard return (^p) for a soft return (^l), also known as a line break - thanks to McFadden (2008). However, we can also swap out non-breaking spaces using "^s", and tabs using "^t", thanks to DiggerDavey (2025). 

And if we don't know which ones of those we have, we only need toggle on the pilcrow symbol on the Word Home ribbon (¶) to see what gets replaced when we run a find and replace. We can read more on the pilcrow here.

A quick find and replace in a document can processing text faster, easier, and more accurate. 

Lovely!

Sam

References:

DiggerDavey. (2025, January 20). What is the "soft return" symbol when trying to replace it with a Hard return. Microsoft. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/what-is-the-soft-return-symbol-when-trying-to/f9232008-4e09-4cff-bde0-9638b7ba2006

McFadden, R. G. (2008, October 8). Is it possible to replace soft returns with hard returns?. https://www.pcreview.co.uk/threads/is-it-possible-to-replace-soft-returns-with-hard-returns.3641701/

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Protecting Word document branding

Thanks to Susan Harkins at TechRepublic (2022), I found out how to protect the branding in my Word headers and footers. As we all know, consistent branding and a good layout makes our Word documents more legible (plus looking more professional). While many organisations have templates for particular documents, the headers and footers which usually contain the branding are often unprotected, so we can inadvertently muck things up.

To prevent that, organisations are able to protect documents, but that doesn't necessarily extend to the header and footer. However, there is a process for doing just that: but it isn’t intuitive (NB: this fix doesn't work on the web version of Word as files "with enabled protection in any section" simply won't open).

OK: so we are in MS Word, our is document all ready to go with our desired branded headers and footers, and the process is as follows (Harkins, 2022):

1. Toggle the Pilcrow - or paragraph mark - icon in Word (that's the icon that looks like this: ¶. Read more here). Doing this will make it easier to see what we are doing to our document
2. Key Ctrl & Home to go to the very beginning of the document
3. At the very beginning point we insert a page break so we can make header/footer changes: Layout | Page Setup | Breaks menu | select "Continuous"
4. Next we protect the document. File | Info (left pane) | Protect Document | select "Restrict Editing" 
5. Word takes us back to our document showing the Restrict Editing options (right pane). Under "Editing Restrictions", tick the option box, and select the default "No Changes (Read Only)". This means we have "protected the entire document: If [we] stopped right now, no one would be able to edit anything. That’s not what we want. We need to unprotect the body of the document" (Harkins, 2022).
6. So to unprotect the body of the Word document we select everything EXCEPT the section header. We key Ctrl & Home to put our cursor at the beginning of the first line. Then we key Ctrl, Shift & End to highlight everything onwards from that section break we inserted in step 3
7. Word will ask us for a password, so we should put in a simple password for now (e.g. "Word" or "pass"). Enter it twice and click OK. Later we will create something more secure
8. Look for the opening and closing brackets at the beginning and ending, respectively, of the unprotected area (which we can see because we turned on the Pilcrow)
9. Close the document, and reopen. Try to edit the header/footer area to check our password works. Seek feedback, make changes, then - once the document is approved for circulation - change the password to something more secure . Ensure the password is logged appropriately!
10. We can now edit the headers/footers by entering the password and making the changes we need. And without the password, the header/footers cannot be changed. Only body of the document can be edited.

As Susan Harkins notes, the "solution isn’t intuitive, and, oddly, Word doesn’t offer an option for protecting only the header and footer" (2022). But thank you to Mrs Harkins once more, for a work-around that helps us do our work :-)

Sam

References:

Harkins, S. (2022, September). How to Protect Header and Footer Areas in Microsoft Word. TechRepublic. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/protect-header-footer-word/

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Word Find and replace using special codes

If you are like me, there will be times when you want to make a load of changes to the formatting of Word documents that have become quite large.

I tend to use Word's Find & Replace function for that, and that is where knowing what the specific Word codes are so we can replace formatting. You can find a broader list of codes at Office Watch (2021) here.

From experience and digging, I have gathered together a number of find and replace codes for those things I use most often, which are:

^s non-breaking space (which, if we toggle on Word's 'show formatting' icon, the Pilcrow, shows as a superscript o, or degree symbol. Read more here). 

^t for tabs

^m for soft returns

^p for hard returns

^g is for graphic

^12 for page breaks

^b for section break

Read more on the Pilcrow here. 

Sam

References:

Office Watch. (2021, August 15). Word Advanced Find – all the special codes. https://office-watch.com/2021/word-advanced-find-all-the-special-codes/

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Replacing Word's non-breaking space

After all these years, I had finally become motivated enough to want to find out just what that little degree symbol meant when Word formatting was toggled on, and whether I needed it. And what I mean is text like this:

with a°50%°SS on one question

This is the degree symbol, which appears to have no other 'official' name (Waddingham, 2014), though apparently it was once called a "gradus" in Latin referring to steps, having many technical and scientific uses, such as temperature, angles, co-ordinates (Symbol Wiki, 2025; Webb, 2018). It is also a 'glyph' not a diacritical, from the Greek, 'carving' (Webb, 2018): what we also know as a pictogram. 

What I didn't realise is that the degree symbol which shows when Word formatting is toggled on is equivalent to " " in html: a non-breaking space (Certent Help, 2021). IT Trip says that "A standard space (ASCII code 32) tells Word that it’s okay to move to a new line at that point if needed. A nonbreaking space (ASCII code 160), on the other hand, instructs Word to keep the adjacent text together on one line" (2025). When we "notice a tiny circle in place of a regular space" because we have toggled on the Pilcrow (¶), we are seeing "a nonbreaking space. The symbol typically looks like a degree sign (°), and if [we] try to delete it as if it were standard text, it can behave unpredictably" (IT Trip, 2025). That is because the non-breaking space often joins things together that it does not make sense for them to be split up, such as a title and a name, an ellipsis, or large, formatted numbers (e.g. Sir Graham Henry; ...; $5 billion). 

If we end up with funny clumps of text that will not break over a line, we can fix it. We simply use find and replace. So, to find and replace non-breaking spaces, which shows as a degree symbol when Word formatting has been toggled on, we simply: 

1. highlight the text we want to replace the non-breaking spaces
2. open Word's Find and Replace box (Ctrl & H), then 
3. key ^s (caret, lower case s) into the "Find what" box
4. key one tap of the spacebar into the "Replace with" box
5. Click the Replace All button

We have now replaced all non-breaking spaces with standard spaces.

However, if we want to key a degree sign on our keyboard, we hold the Alt key down and key 0176. We get a °. 

And finally, if we want to add a non-breaking space in Word we simply highlight the standard space we want to replace with a non-breaking space, and key Ctrl, Shift and Spacebar (Wright, 2025).

I think that covers it!

Sam

References:

Certent Help. (2021). Non-breaking space. https://dm.certent.com/help/Content/D_Draft/Format/nonbreaking_space.htm

IT Trip. (2025, April 10). How to Remove or Replace Nonbreaking Spaces in Word for Perfect Document Formatting. https://en.ittrip.xyz/ms-office/word/remove-nonbreaking-space

Symbol Wiki. (2025). Degree Sign Symbol °. https://symbolwiki.com/en/degree-sign

Waddingham, A. (Ed.) (2014). New Hart's Rules: The Oxford style guide (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.

Webb, S. (2018). Clash of Symbols: A Ride Through the Riches of Glyphs. Springer International Publishing AG.

Wright, E. (2025). How to Insert Nonbreaking Spaces in Microsoft Word. https://erinwrightwriting.com/how-to-insert-nonbreaking-spaces-in-microsoft-word/

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Word's format painter

Microsoft Office programmes are pretty much - to mix a metaphor - the lingua franca of business. And, if we are writing a document, it is MS Word we use. 

Most of the time, things go smoothly. But every now and again I will run into a problem where the formatting in Word goes glitchy, and not even undo will get me out of trouble. 

That is where the format painter tool often gets me out of trouble. Located in the home ribbon, in the Clipboard section of that toolbar, I simply highlight the formatting I want copied in my document, and click the paintbrush (aka format painter) tool to 'copy' it; then position my mouse over my troublesome text to 'paste' the formatting and enter. That usually ends the problem. 

However, there are a couple of extra tricks. 

• Firstly, hot keys. We can key Alt, Ctrl and C on the keyboard to copy a format, and Alt, Ctrl V to paste it. Too easy. And if we use the hotkeys, we can repeatedly re-paste the copied formatting to many areas without needing to re-copy (Microsoft Support, 2019)
• Secondly, to stop formatting, key ESC (Microsoft Support, 2019)
• Thirdly, toggling on the pilcrow symbol on the Word Home ribbon (¶) will allow us to see our paragraph marks. If we highlight entire paragraphs including our paragraph marks, then copy formatting, we can paste paragraph formatting around our document as well (Indeed, 2025).

But note that the format painter tool will not copy the background cell colours in a table.

Sam

References:

Indeed. (2025, March 27). How To Use Format Painter in Word (With Tips). https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/how-to-use-format-painter-in-word

Microsoft Support. (2019, July 07). Use the Format Painter. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-the-format-painter-4bb415a9-d4e4-42b7-b579-170adc594e40

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