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
    2015-06-05T12:15:46+00:00

    Hi MSS...

    I enjoyed your sarcasm!

    While I appreciated Kae's suggestion....really? Add a section break after EACH heading?? I work with many long documents and use Styles all the time. To have to insert section breaks every few paragraphs is more inefficient than having to re-click the arrow if the text got collapsed by mistake.

    I just needed to know how to turn the feature off, and that does not exist. This is what Microsoft has to do - give the user the OPTION to turn on/off annoying features. Maybe in the next version, but I doubt it.

    I'm a Microsoft fan, love all the applications, but I'm always surprised at some of the changes made from version to version. I posted the question a long time ago, so this is not an issue anymore. Ya gotta get over what you have no control over. :)

    Thanks for the smile on a Friday!

    Tammy

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-06-04T20:48:43+00:00

    Hi Tammy,

    One way to collapse a paragraph without collapsing all the text until the next heading is to set a continuous page break at the point you want to collapse up to. 

    Kae

    There's your workaround. Insert continuous page breaks immediately following each heading, then even if you hit the little arrow by mistake you won't collapse any of the text in the section. I imagine the geniuses at Redmond will come up with some way to defeat this, just as they appear to be attempting to do with every other way users might want to customize (read: use to do actual work rather than for whatever purposes said geniuses think users should want to use them) any of their products the next time they release a new version of Word, probably next week, but until then we're good to go. God I just can't wait for Windows 10. :p

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  3. 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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