The easiest way to get rid of it is to use the Ctrl+Q combination on your keyboard. What you’ve experienced is the default behavior in Word that you can change. If you keep pressing the Enter key, you keep on creating a new paragraph that contains the border at the bottom of the paragraph. The horizontal line is actually a border created by Word at the bottom of the paragraph. After you hit the Enter key, you won’t see the 3 characters that you typed, you will only see the horizontal line that can’t be deleted. In the image below, I typed each of the above characters 3 times, without a space between them, and hit the Enter key. If you type 3 of the following characters consecutively in a blank row, that doesn’t have any text, and then press the Enter key, Word creates a border around that paragraph. However, I’ve tested it only on the newer versions of Microsoft Word, up to Word 2019.įirst let me explain what’s going on. The solution works in most, if not all, versions of Microsoft Word.
It’s like Jason in the movie Friday the 13th, you just can’t kill him. Even if you select the area that contains the line, you just can’t delete it. Remember, the line behaves as if it were “invisible” to Word. Now there is absolutely no way for you to go down below the line and add any text. You just created yet another serious problem for yourself. Let’s say you delete all the text below the line (the second paragraph in the above image). Don’t bother copying these paragraphs to a new Word document because you will be copying the problem to the new document. The bold line is practically invisible to Word and Word can’t delete what it can’t see. If I create some space above and below the bold line, select the area above and below the line with my mouse and then delete the entire area, it sure will delete the line. If my cursor is above the thick line at the end of line 4, pressing the Enter key simply moves the horizontal line down.
I typed a series of underscores and then pressed the Enter key, which created a bold line. The problem is only experienced when you do this on a blank line (see 5th line).
If you were to add a series of underscores on a line that has text (see third line), and then hit the Enter key, there won’t be a problem. As soon as you hit the Enter key, the disaster strikes because now you can’t delete the line. On a blank line in Microsoft Word, you enter a series of underscores, perhaps to create a line like the one in the image below to separate the two paragraphs. The fix is so easy even a cave man can do it….as long as he’s comfortable with using a mouse and keyboard, of course. In my opinion, it’s one of the most irritating things in Word that I have ever encountered. There is a keyboard shortcut for this: put your cursor in the paragraph with the border and then press ctrl + q.Have you ever run into a situation in Microsoft Word where you somehow ended up with a horizontal line that you absolutely can’t delete? In this article I will show you what can cause this situation and what you can do to fix the problem. Select the No Border option (or any of the other border options that serve), and the horizontal line will be removed. To remove the paragraph border, put your cursor in the paragraph and go to the Home tab > Paragraph group, and click on the Borders button. The border is added to the preceding paragraph. Paragraph borders can be quickly (and sometimes inadvertently) added by typing three or more hyphens and then pressing enter. If this pesky horizontal line is not on a table, then it may be a paragraph border. If the line appears on a table, it could just be a simple case of changing the tables border attributes to get rid of the line (put your cursor in the table, go to the Table Tools > Design tab and click the Borders button).
Even if we are working on a document created by ourselves, we may not remember how we created the line. How do you get rid of it? If we are working on a document created by someone else, we probably won’t know how the line was added. You have a horizontal line that you can’t delete in your document.