A reader wrote to me recently inquiring whether there was a keyboard shortcut to delete all tab stops in her document.
Unfortunately there is no keyboard shortcut to accomplish this task. You must use the Tabs dialog box instead.
Follow the steps below to learn how:
Click CTRL + A to select your entire document.
Display the Home tab of your Ribbon.
Click the small icon at the bottom-right of the Paragraph group to display the dialog box.
Click the Tabs button at the bottom-left to display the Tabs dialog box.
Click the Clear All button.
Click OK.
In version 2003, simply click on Format | Tab | Clear All.
I have read different posts that suggest a quick way to delete tab stops is to select all the text and then click CTRL + Q. This removes all explicit paragraph formatting from your text. While the tab stops are a paragraph format, CTRL + Q just removes any explicitly added tab stops and sets the paragraphs back to whatever formatting is defined for each paragraph’s style. So if the underly paragraph style has tab stops defined, those stops remain after CTRL + Q is clicked and not all tab stops are removed.
More importantly, you should know that when you get rid of your paragraph stops, Word’s default tab stops automatically take place. The default tab stops in MS Word are set for every half inch. You can set them to a different setting, but you cannot cleanse your document of all tabs completely. There is no method to do this.
Should you need to remove tab stops from a large number of documetns you may want to use a macro to accomplish the task for you. The macro below will remove all tab stops from all paragraphs in yoru document:
Sub TabsGone()
ActiveDocument.Paragraphs.TabStops.ClearAll
End Sub
