Hi Suzanne,
Thanks for your reply. I need time to study and follow up on your
explanation here. I'm going to try to figure things out. It sure takes time
to learn this program.
With appreciation for your help,
Lilly Cagney

"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote:
With regard to automatic formatting, see
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/TameAutoFormat.htm.

From your comments, I suspect you're a very new Word user; you might want to
look at Shauna Kelly's introduction to Word use at
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/conc...ion/index.html

There are four kinds of indents in Word: left, right, first-line, and
hanging. These are all represented by markers on the ruler (see
http://word.mvps.org/faqs/formatting/UsingRulers.htm), and the easiest way
to see what they do might be to drag the ruler markers in turn to see their
effect on a block of text. The left indent setting indents the entire
paragraph from the left margin, and the right indent does the same on the
right. Ordinarily you will indent it to be inside the margin, so that the
paragraph is narrower than the rest of the text (a block quote, for
example), but you can use a negative indent (sometimes called an "outdent")
to allow the paragraph to extend into the margin. You may have seen this
with headings in books that stick out into the left margin.

The first-line indent applies a left indent to just the first line of a
paragraph. This keeps you from having to press Tab at the beginning of every
paragraph when you want text to be indented the way it usually is in books.
The hanging indent does just the opposite: it indents every line except the
first. One of the most common uses for this is bulleted or numbered
paragraphs, and if you use the Bullets or Numbering button on your toolbar,
you'll see that the paragraph has a hanging indent.

"Wrap to window" is a red herring in your case, but I'll try to explain it
anyway. It is a view setting. When you are in Print Layout view, which is
the view most users use most of the time, your text wraps (starts a new
line) at the right margin, just the way it will when you print the page. If
you switch to Normal view (which most users don't use, though I use it most
of the time), all the text is on the left and, unless you're using a high
Zoom ratio or a narrow window, there's a lot of empty space on the right.

If you keep a task pane open, that takes up some of the space, but if
you're, for example, a novelist and just want to use the space to write in
and want to be able to see as much of the text as possible, you can, when
you are in Normal view, choose the "Wrap to window" view setting, and the
text will run all the way to the right side of the window before wrapping.

This is not WYSIWYG at all (doesn't represent what will print), but it does
make the most efficient use of the space. It's suitable only for
text-intensive documents--wouldn't be useful at all for documents containing
graphics, tables, etc. (but then neither is Normal view most of the time).

Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org

"Lilly Cagney" wrote in message
...
Thank you Suzanne.
I looked at the Paragraph dialog and saw the indentation settings. I
think the problem may be with automatic formatting which I wasn't aware
of.

My document seemed inconsistent. Some of the lines were justified to the
left and some weren't. (This is a puppet show with dialogue.) I prefer
them
all justified to the left border (margin) in this particular document.
(except for the title, of course). So, after reading your explanation, I
went
to the indentation dialogue and took out the indentations, including the
"first line" numbers. In other words, I set everything to 0". That
justified
the lines to the left.

But I really don't understand what they mean by "first line" indentation.

Do you think I should turn off the automatice formatting? How do I do
that?

Also I don't completely understand what the difference is between
"wrapping
to window " and not "wrapping to window", especially as it effects the
different views.

Thank you for your help. I can see that this is a very complex program to
learn.
It's nice of you to help me.
Lilly Cagney

"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote:
Normal view is the view you get if you check Normal on the View menu or
click Normal View on the horizontal scroll bar. If you have "Wrap to
window"
enabled in this view, the text will take up the whole screen. Clearly
this
is not the issue.
In the Format | Paragraph dialog, see what the Indentation: Right
setting
is. If it is anything other than 0", then you have an indent. If the
number
is negative, then your paragraph will extend outside the margin.
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org

"Lilly Cagney" wrote in message
...
PS to Suzanne: Also, I don't know what you mean by "a negative right
indent".
I haven't done any indenting. All my sentences begin at the margin.
Lilly Cagney

"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote:
Does the paragraph have a negative right indent? Are you in Normal
view
with "Wrap to window" enabled (Tools | Options | View)?
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org

"Lilly Cagney" Lilly wrote in
message
...
Why is my text wrapping outside my margin? (I am using Microsoft
Office Word 2003, the professional edition.)
Lilly Cagney