Line Up Currency Document For Free

Sooner or later, you're going to be typing numbers into your document, and some of them will be currency. Maybe it'll be a list of assets in a probate estate, or, perhaps, you'll be delineating damages in a demand letter. What I see people do in situations like this, is use a combination of default tabs with a few extra spaces thrown in to try to line things up. But, if you throw a grid behind your document, by going to View, Show Gridlines, you'll see the ugly truth. Your numbers aren't lined up at all. That's because when you're using a proportional font, like Times New Roman, every character takes up a different amount of space. That's what makes proportional fonts proportional. That's also what makes them more aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Instead of trying to line your numbers up manually, set up a decimal tab. First, turn on the ruler by going to the View tab, and checking the box next to Ruler. Then, select the paragraphs you need to list numbers in -- remember, tabs are a paragraph alignment setting -- and go to the Home tab, and click the small launcher arrow in the lower right-hand corner of the Paragraph section. Click the Tabs button in the lower left-hand corner of the Paragraph dialog box. Once you're in the tabs dialog box, take a look at the document behind it, and figure out where the decimal point should land. In this example, maybe we'd want the decimal point to be around the three-inch mark. Type 3.0 into the Tab stop position field. Then, select decimal in the Alignment section just below. If you want some sort of leader character, like dots, you can select that in the Leader section at the bottom. Click Set, and repeat that process for any other tabs you need to set. Then, click OK to finish. If you've already got a bunch of tabs and spaces in your newly reformatted paragraphs, just take those out. You should be left with one tab stop, just before your numbers. If you've still got Ruler turned on, you'll also see a little gray character at the three-inch mark, that looks like an upside-down T with a dot next to it. That's your decimal tab setting. And, if you decide that three inches isn't quite right, you can select your paragraphs, and then drag the character back and forth across the ruler, to reset your decimal tab. If you set your decimal tab before you start typing your numbers, which I recommend, this is what you'll see happening. Did you catch that? The number anchored at the tab stop, and pushed the digits to the left. Then, when I hit the decimal key, the numbers started typing to the right.