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How to turn off or show/ hide formatting marks or characters in Outlook?

Author Siluvia Last modified

You might see there are a lot of special symbols appearing on your text body when composing an email message. They’re formatting marks. Sometimes you are fed up with these visible marks and want to turn them off or just hide them. What should you do? With this tutorial, turning off or hiding formatting marks won’t be a problem anymore.

Temporally show/hide formatting marks or characters in Outlook

Permanently turn off formatting marks or characters in Outlook


Temporally show/hide formatting marks or characters in Outlook

You can temporarily hide formatting marks as follows.

1. Go to the Format Text tab in the new email dialog, and then click on the Show/Hide button in the Paragraph group. See screenshot:

doc-turn-off-formatting-marks-1

2. After clicking the Show/Hide button, all formatting marks are disappeared from the email body.

Notes:
  • If you want to show all formatting marks, please click the Show/Hide button again.
  • The Show/Hide button won’t work if the following formatting mark boxes are checked. See screenshot:
  • doc-turn-off-formatting-marks-2

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Permanently turn off formatting marks or characters in Outlook

If you want to permanently turn off all the formatting marks, you can do it as follows.

1. In the new composing message window, click File > Options. See screenshot:

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2. In the Outlook Options dialog, click Mail in the left section, and then click Editor Options… under Compose messages in the right section.

doc-turn-off-formatting-marks-4

3. When the Editor Options dialog pops up, click Display in the left section. In the right section and under Always show these formatting marks on the screen, uncheck all boxes, and then click OK twice to finish the whole setting.

doc-turn-off-formatting-marks-5

4. Now when you open the new email composing dialog, the formatting marks won’t appear anymore.


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