Word Resume Formatting: Tabs, Styles and Spacing

Almost every Word resume problem comes from formatting by hand. These five techniques cover the whole job and each one replaces something people do the hard way.

One: right tab stops instead of tables

The single most useful technique in this list.

You want the employer on the left and the dates on the right, on the same line. The usual approaches are a two-column table, which extracts unpredictably, or a run of tab presses, which shift when the font changes.

The correct way: set a right-aligned tab stop at the right margin on the paragraph, then press Tab exactly once between the two pieces of text.

Halvorsen Foods⇥Mar 2021 to Jun 2026

The date sits flush right at any font size, the paragraph remains one ordinary paragraph, and the text extracts in reading order. Put the tab stop in your job-line style and every entry inherits it.

The same technique handles a location on the right, or a right-aligned graduation year in education entries.

Two: paragraph spacing instead of empty lines

The habit that causes inconsistent gaps throughout a document.

Pressing Enter twice creates an empty paragraph. Its height depends on the font size of that empty paragraph, which nobody sets deliberately, so gaps end up slightly different in different places. Delete a line and the spacing changes.

Instead, set space before and space after in the paragraph style. A section heading with 12 points before and 4 after produces a consistent gap everywhere, and it cannot drift.

The visible payoff: a document where the space above every section heading is identical, which is most of what makes a plain resume look deliberate rather than careless.

Three: styles instead of direct formatting

The discipline that keeps the other four honest.

Microsoft documents customising or creating styles. Define four for a resume: name, section heading, job line, body bullet. Then apply them and never touch the font controls on the toolbar.

Two concrete benefits. Changing your mind about the body font becomes a single edit rather than forty. And copying text between documents stops importing foreign formatting, because you reapply the style on arrival.

If you have inherited a messy document, the fastest repair is to select each block and reapply a style rather than nudging individual settings.

Four: non-breaking spaces and hyphens

Small, and it removes a specific ugliness.

Word will happily break “Mar 2021” across two lines, or split a phone number, or separate a number from its unit. A non-breaking space glues the two parts together so they wrap as a unit.

Use them between month and year, inside phone numbers, between a number and a percentage sign, and in company names that must not split. It is a keystroke and it eliminates a category of awkward line breaks.

Five: keep-with-next for headings

The setting that prevents the worst page-break failure.

Without it, Word will put a job title at the bottom of page one and its bullets at the top of page two. Keep with next on the job-line style tells Word never to break between that paragraph and the following one.

Apply it to section headings and job lines. Combine it with keep lines together on body paragraphs so a single bullet is not split across pages.

For deliberate breaks, use a page break rather than a run of empty paragraphs, and if you need genuinely independent page setup, Microsoft documents inserting a section break.

The settings to fix once

Beyond the five techniques, a short list worth setting deliberately.

• Margins 0.5 to 1 inch, equal left and right.
• Line spacing single, never 1.15 by default, which is where an extra half page comes from.
• Justification left, not justified. Justified text on a narrow column creates rivers of white space.
• Hyphenation off. Hyphenated words in a resume look like a typesetting accident.
• Widow and orphan control on.
• Colour near-black for body text. Light grey fails the contrast ratios in the WCAG standards and is harder to read than it looks on a bright screen.

Bullets, set once

Set the bullet character, the indent and the hanging indent in the bullet style rather than by pressing Tab.

One level only. Nested bullets on a resume are rarely justified and they are where indentation drifts as you edit. If a sub-point matters, it is either its own bullet or part of the parent.

A ten-minute repair on an existing resume

Take a document that has been edited by hand for years.

1. Turn on formatting marks and delete every empty paragraph.
2. Select all, set line spacing to single, clear space before and after.
3. Define the four styles and apply them section by section.
4. Add space before and after to the heading style.
5. Replace every table with right tab stops.
6. Add keep-with-next to headings and job lines.
7. Export to PDF and check the page breaks.

Nothing about the content changes and the document looks substantially better.

Microsoft’s Word training material covers these controls in more depth if any step is unfamiliar.

Related

For the overall build, see the Microsoft Word resume guide. For fixing broken documents, see Word resume troubleshooting, and for reusable setups advanced Word resume techniques. For fonts, see the resume fonts guide.

Or let a tool handle it and build one free.