Turn off paragraph collapse/expand arrows in word 2013

Anonymous
2013-01-18T15:27:33+00:00

Hi -

I'm not sure what it is called in Word 2013, but an arrow appears before a paragraph heading that allows you to collapse all text following the paragraph until it comes to another paragraph heading. Yeah - how do you turn this annoying feature off? I have clicked that arrow so many times when I just wanted to select text. I may be missing the item in the Options dialog box, can't seem to find it.

Thanks so much!

Tammy

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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Jay Freedman 208.3K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
2017-02-12T22:59:53+00:00

Thank you! I don't use group policy very much, and I wasn't aware that there were such settings there.

For other readers, if you don't have the group policy administrative templates or OCT for your version of Office, you can download the appropriate file here:

Office 2013 Administrative Templates and OCT

Office 2016 Administrative Templates and OCT

After the templates are installed, run the group policy editor (gpedit.exe*) with administrator rights. In the left panel, drill down to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Microsoft Word 2013 (or 2016) > Word Options > Advanced. The two zoom level settings are about halfway down the list on the right side.

*The Home edition of Windows doesn't include the group policy editor. If that's the edition you have, then see https://www.itechtics.com/enable-gpedit-windows-10-home/.

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Anonymous
2017-02-12T16:44:30+00:00

All of the responses that are focused on removing the heading functionality are great unless you need headings to automatically number paragraphs or create a table of contents, etc.

If you really need the Expand/Collapse markers to go away, from group policy or the Office Customization Tool (OCT), set the Set the minimum zoom level for expand/collapse on-object UI to 110 and Set the maximum zoom level for expand/collapse on-object UI to 90. The little markers to the left of the heading go away. If you right-click, you can still collapse the heading. Right-click again and Expand heading is grayed out but Expand all headingsis still available.

For information on changing settings in group policy, go here:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179176.aspx

Hope this helps!

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  1. Jay Freedman 208.3K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2013-06-21T19:13:46+00:00

    If you don't mind doing some work, you don't have to make everything use Body Text style.

    Instead, you can define custom styles that have the same character and paragraph formatting as the built-in heading styles, but set the outline level of each one to "Body Text" (which is confusingly named the same as the one-and-only Body Text style but is not related to the style). Tables of contents can be created by inserting TC fields in the heading paragraphs, but that's still more work.

    That will remove the expand/collapse arrows -- but at the additional cost of losing any usefulness of Outline View or the hierarchy in the Navigation pane. In my opinion, it's better to just learn what the arrows are about, and avoid them when necessary.

    One other hint: If any headings are collapsed, or you even suspect that some of them might be collapsed, you can right-click any heading and click Expand/Collapse > Expand All Headings. You can also add a button for that command to the Quick Access Toolbar.

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-06-21T17:52:15+00:00

    Thanks for your response, Jason! I do understand the purpose of the arrow, and I do use headings to create things like table of contents, so the body text heading will not work for me.

    It's a nice feature, especially if you are creating large documents and would like to collapse and expand to work on "pieces" of the doc and keep other pieces hidden. But, it really should be a user choice. I make a point of mentioning it in all of my training sessions - it has already confused some of my users who have received documents from others - and, my advice is to change the paragraphs to body text, if possible, to avoid the arrows.

    Thanks, again, for taking the time to respond.

    Tammy

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-06-04T15:41:58+00:00

    The expand/collapse arrows are governed by the "outline level" selected in the paragraph settings dialog.  

    By default, if you are using the standard "Heading [#]" style settings for your headings, the outline level will be set depending on the heading style chosen.  If you want to remove the arrows, you will have to use the "body text" outline level for your heading styles.  You can access the "outline level" setting in the paragraph dialog.  Note you may need to create a new heading style since Word does not allow you to change the "outline level" of their default heading styles.

    I'm not too familiar with what Word does with the "outline level", but this may cause problems if you are using the automatic table of contents tool.

    Jason

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