Recently I received the following question from a reader.
"We are grappling with how to generate a dot leader in Word. For example we use this all the time:
MARKET VALUE………………………$1,525,000
I now copy this from a Word Perfect document that has been converted and I type in the dots manually. Is there a better way?"
The short answer is yes. You can create dot leaders easily if you learn a little about setting tabs. As someone who has spent a lot of time cleaning up bad tabs, I’ve learned that you can do two things to make your tabular life better. First, know that Word is not a typewriter, so you only need to press the Tab key once in your text if you set it up right. If you show non-printing characters (click the Show/Hide toolbar button that looks like a paragraph) you can tell how many tabs are in each line.
So now you’re thinking, okay with just one tab, how do I get my text over far enough? That brings me to my second suggestion: set tabs. Highlight the text you have typed (which, of course, has just one tab in between each item). You then can set tabs by clicking on the ruler or using the menu option. However, to include a dot leader, you need to use the menu, so choose Format|Tabs. In the dialog box, you’ll see you have many choices.
Click the type of tab (left, right, center, decimal, bar). Then select the dot leader (option 2) and type the location of the tab. In this case, since the tabbed text involves numbers, you’d probably choose a decimal tab with a dot leader. Click OK and you’ll see your new tab stop on the ruler and the text jumps to that location. If it’s in the wrong place, just click and drag the tab stop. To remove the tab, you can either click and drag the tab stop off the ruler, or choose Format|Tabs again, select the tab setting, and click the Clear button.