# Show/hide nonprinting characters

Nonprinting characters help you edit a document. They indicate the presence of various types of formatting, but they do not print with the document, even when they are displayed on the screen.

To show or hide nonprinting characters, click the Nonprinting characters icon at the Home tab of the top toolbar.

Nonprinting characters include:

Spaces |  | Inserted when you press the Spacebar on the keyboard. It creates a space between characters.
Tabs |  | Inserted when you press the Tab key. It's used to advance the cursor to the next tab stop.
Paragraph marks (i.e. hard returns) |  | Inserted when you press the Enter key. It ends a paragraph and adds a bit of space after it. It contains information about the paragraph formatting.
Line breaks (i.e. soft returns) |  | Inserted when you use the Shift+Enter key combination. It breaks the current line and puts lines of text close together. Soft return is primarily used in titles and headings.
Nonbreaking spaces |  | Inserted when you use the Ctrl+Shift+Spacebar key combination. It creates a space between characters which can't be used to start a new line.
Page breaks |  | Inserted when you use the Breaks icon at the Insert or Layout tab of the top toolbar and then select the Insert Page Break option, or select the Page break before option in the right-click menu or advanced settings window.
Section breaks |  | Inserted when you use the Breaks icon at the Insert or Layout tab of the top toolbar and then select one of the Insert Section Break submenu options (the section break indicator differs depending on which option is selected: Next Page, Continuous Page, Even Page or Odd Page).
Column breaks |  | Inserted when you use the Breaks icon at the Insert or Layout tab of the top toolbar and then select the Insert Column Break option.
End-of-cell and end-of row markers in tables |  | These markers contain formatting codes for the individual cell and row, respectively.
Small black square in the margin to the left of a paragraph |  | It indicates that at least one of the paragraph options was applied, e.g. Keep lines together, Page break before.
Anchor symbols |  | They indicate the position of floating objects (those with a wrapping style other than Inline), e.g. images, autoshapes, charts. You should select an object to make its anchor visible.