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Symptoms
In your document, you see dots where there should be spaces, arrows where there should be tabs, and other characters that you don't expect.
Cause
These symbols are visible on-screen when the formatting marks are turned on in Word.
(When a document is printed, these symbols don't appear on paper. They are merely on-screen aides to help you see the underlying formatting of the document.)
Resolution
Hide the formatting marks:
-
On the Home tab, in the Paragraph group, click the Show/Hide button, which looks like a paragraph mark: