Is there life after “Reveal Codes”?

Article contributed by Suzanne S. Barnhill

One of the questions most commonly asked by migrants to Word from WordPerfect is, “Where is Reveal Codes?” or “Does Word have anything like Reveal Codes?”

There is nothing in Word directly comparable to Reveal Codes in WordPerfect. There is a very good reason for this. WordPerfect can be thought of (and I understand is) basically a text stream with codes interspersed (for more on this, see John McGhie's article on Word vs. WordPerfect). This is what you see when you Reveal Codes. You have codes or markers that turn on and off certain formatting characteristics. Word, on the other hand, is a series of nesting containers, characters inside words inside paragraphs inside sections inside documents. The formatting of these is by styles and by pointers at the beginning and end of the document. I am reliably informed that if you open a Word document in a hex editor, you see a forest of gibberish at the beginning and end that represent these codes and pointers (you can get a small idea of this by opening a document using the Recover Text from Any File setting under “Files of type” in the File Open dialog). So Reveal Codes, even if there were such a thing in Word, would not be very helpful.

But there are many helpful cues and clues in Word if you know how to use them. The feature commonly touted as Word's equivalent to Reveal Codes is the “What's This?” button on the Help menu. Click on that (or press Shift+F1), then click in a paragraph, and you'll get information about formatting applied both by the style and directly. Rarely, however, does this tell you much more than you can tell by just looking at the paragraph on screen.

The “What’s This?” button has been replaced in Word 2002 by the Reveal Formatting task pane, which gives you specific information about the text at the insertion point (font, paragraph, and even section formatting). To display the task pane, View | Task Pane (or click on the New or Styles and Formatting toolbar button), then click the down arrow at the top of the task pane and choose Reveal Formatting. If you check the box for “Distinguish style source,” you can easily see what formatting is part of the style and what has been directly applied.

As a general rule, you want to avoid direct formatting. If you use styles to do your formatting and avoid manual formatting as much as possible, you will find that simply looking at the style name in the Formatting toolbar or Style Area will usually tell you all you need to know.

More importantly, use styles to do your formatting and avoid manual formatting as much as possible; you will then find that simply looking at the style name in the Formatting toolbar will usually tell you all you need to know.

Here are some more things that do help, in my experience.

1.	The most important one is display of nonprinting characters. The Show/Hide ¶ button on the Standard toolbar toggles this display on and off.
	The meaning of each of the nonprinting characters (or “formatting marks,” as they are known in Word 2000 and 2002), is explained in What do all those funny marks, like the dots between the words in my document, and the square bullets in the left margin, mean? With these symbols displayed, it is much easier to find out that, for example, your document is printing an extra blank page because you have half a dozen empty paragraphs at the end.
2.	The second most important is display of text boundaries in Print Layout view. You'll find this on the View tab of Tools | Options for that view. This is helpful not only in visualizing margins but also for seeing the outlines of graphics (even when they're not selected) and table cell boundaries (even when gridlines are not displayed). Some people evidently prefer the cleaner page appearance they get without this display, but for a truly WYSIWYG view, you can always switch to Print Preview.
3.	While you’re looking at the View Options, be sure to check the box for “Drawings” and clear the check box for “Picture placeholders.” For more on this, see I inserted some graphics in a document, but now I can't see them; or there is just an empty box where one should be; or my graphics won't print. You will probably want to check the box for “Object anchors,” which help you see what paragraph a floating graphic is anchored to, but you may prefer to display bookmarks only when troubleshooting because the heavy brackets are ugly and distracting (and hidden bookmarks are not marked, anyway). Other important View Options include the vertical ruler, status bar, and ScreenTips. Display of the horizontal ruler is toggled on the View menu.
4.	In addition to the above, there are other visual cues. With the insertion point in a given paragraph or word, or with a portion of the text selected, you can look at the toolbars to see what style is in use, what font and point size are being used, and whether bold or italic formatting is in effect. Although you can usually tell just by looking at it whether text is bold or italic, problems can often arise from incorrect formatting of the paragraph mark itself. With the insertion point in a paragraph, you can see from the ruler whether any paragraph indents are in effect. If you select the entire paragraph, you can see (from the extent of the block selected) whether the paragraph has some Space Before or After.
5.	One of the most useful tools when working with an entire document is the Style Area (see to the right). This is available only in Normal view. On the View tab of Tools | Options, set the style area width to a value greater than 0" (1" is usually sufficient unless your style names are very long). Word will then display the style for each paragraph in your document, and you can scroll through and check for incorrect or improperly formatted styles. Double-clicking on a style name in the Style Area will bring up the Style dialog box with the current style selected.

By using all these visual cues, and by understanding at least a little of the difference between the Word and WordPerfect object models, you will gradually be able to wean yourself from the desire for “Reveal Codes.”