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Resume Pilots is an award-winning executive resume writing firm and a proud member of the Professional Association of Resume Writers and Career Coaches. If you prefer to start with a resume template that already has tab stops in place, use one of our executive resume templates. In Summaryīy following the steps outlined above, you’ll not only save time on formatting but also ensure that it is consistent 100% of the time.
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Simply put, it’s worth investing a bit of extra effort to avoid the risk of leaving such an impression. It can also make them assume that you don’t have a strong command of Microsoft Word, which is expected in today’s hiring market. If your date alignment is messy or inconsistent, it can signal a lack of attention to detail to recruiters. Why it’s Important to Align Dates on Your Resume To quickly recreate existing tab stops, you can copy and paste the paragraph with the tab stop onto another line.Īlternatively, you can use the format painter option to apply the same settings to a new paragraph. If you need to adjust your tab, you can double-click on this symbol or simply drag it along the ruler to the desired position. You’ll know you have a tab in place when you see the symbol in the red circle above. Your dates should now be right-aligned correctly! With the cursor still in front of the “M” in “March 2016,” press the tab key on your keyboard. Once you have the correct inputs, click OK. While these leaders may work well when creating a table of contents for a report, for example, we’ll select None. The leader option allows you to insert a series of dots, dashes, or a line between the “Head of Customer Experience” title and the dates. This setting will ensure your text is flush right at the 7.5-inch mark where you place the tab. Select Right to make sure the text is aligned right, as shown in the blue circle.
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You may need to adjust your tab stop position depending on how big your margins are, however. In our example, the right-most position falls at 7.5 inches (see green circle below), so we input 7.5 (as shown in the red circle). The tab stop position tells Word where you want text aligned on the page. Once you have the Tabs window open, you’ll need to make three selections: If you haven’t used them before, tab stops are simply a way to align text with one click using the tab key on your keyboard.
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Open Paragraph Settings by clicking the icon circled in red above.
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