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. Anonymous
    2018-01-12T19:07:11+00:00

    haha! I hear you on looking up "Group Policy and OCT settings!"

    Thank you, MS_1971_MS - there are a lot of pages of responses to this post, and it was from 2013, so you may have missed the full discussion. I do know what styles are and understand how they work. I just needed to know if there was a way to turn off those arrows - I did know why they were there. Unfortunately, there is no way to turn them off (through Options), and we have gotten used to them by now.

    Thanks, again, for taking the time to respond!

    Have a great day,

    Tammy

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-01-12T19:10:02+00:00

    It could just be that the style needs changing.  If you select the text and (re)apply Normal or No Space style, it'll get rid of the annoying arrows.  No need to go into Group Policy or OCT settings (or if you're like me, despair at having to look up WTH they even are).

    As I stated earlier, changing the style when the formatting of the style is necessary, defeats the purpose. Normal or No Space will not give you multilevel numbering attached to styles.

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-04-14T04:49:27+00:00

    So my "Outline level" option was grayed out. What I had to do was select the first heading option in the ribbon on the Home tab, "Normal". It took me too long to figure out.

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