Word users can become massively frustrated by something a simple as a line. Not a line of text, but a line like this:

There are several things you could call a line in Word. Here’s the list of what’s what:

Underline. The most basic of text decorations, the underline is so boring and traditional that even typewriters were capable of producing them.

I am very disappointed in your choice of underline.

In Word, underlines are a text-level attribute. They’re applied by using the Ctrl+U keyboard shortcut, or choosing the Underline button on the toolbar/ribbon.

There’s also double-underline, which underlines text with two underlines. That keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+Shift+D

You can use the Font dialog box to apply word-by-word underlines, dotted underline, and other underline styles as well, though those styles aren’t really confused with the other lines of Word, such as:

Leader Tab. Another type of line that may vex you isn’t a line at all, but a leader tab. So it’s really a tab “character” you see an not a line at all. It’s just that Word is formatting the tab character to look like an underline.

Because the leader tab is a character, you can delete it simply by backspacing over it. Or you can reformat the tabs for the document to replace the leader tab with another character or change it back to a regular tab.

In my Word For Dummies books, I recommend using underline leader tabs when creating fill-in-the-blanks forms. Again, you can delete them if you don’t like them, or reformat the tabs.

Oh, and to confirm that they are tabs and not any other type of line, use the Show/Hide command.

Above, you see how the Show/Hide command reveals the underline to be a tab, not any other type of graphic or text decoration.

Border. Borders are perhaps the most vexing of the lines in Word. That’s because they’re called borders and not lines, which is what most normal people would call them.

Borders are a paragraph-level decoration. While you can box individual words, that’s not the same as the underline thing. What annoys people are the lines above and below text.

There is no obvious way to detect a border by looking at it, especially when the borders can have a number of styles (not just solid lines). Also, when two paragraphs with borders appear one after the other, the line show up only above or below the entire group of paragraphs. That can be frustrating.

Line Art. Another type of line you’ll see in a Word document is a real line, a graphical element and not a text decoration at all. The line can only be summoned by inserting an Auto Shape into a document. Once there, text can either flow around the line or the line can be stuck into the text like any other character.

Line Art isn’t a big deal for most Word users. That’s because you can point the mouse at the graphic and the mouse pointer changes to a four-pointing arrow thing. That’s your clue that the line is a graphic; pressing the Delete key after clicking the graphic removes it from the document.