Understanding the Advance Field

Fields allow you to control special features in Word, or to insert special information in your documents. One of the fields you can use is the Advance field. This field is used for positioning the text that follows the field. All text to the end of the paragraph is affected. For instance, let's say you wanted all the text after the field to be moved up by six points. You could use the following field:

{ ADVANCE \u 6 }

This might not seem like such a big deal, since you can also move text up by using superscript formatting. However, the field can be cumulative, so that you can create some interesting effects. Let's say, for example, that you wanted each word in a sentence to move up by six points from the word before. In this instance, all you need to do is include the above field at the beginning of each word in the sentence. Word formats the text so it appears to be "stair stepping" upwards.

There are several switches you can use with the Advance field, as follow.

There is a caveat to keep in mind when it comes to the \y switch—it is ignored by Word if you use the switch in tables, text boxes, footnotes, endnotes, annotations, headers, or footers. In other words, it is pretty much only of use if you use the \y switch with an Advance field that is in the main document.

You should also realize that it is possible for you to use the Advance field to move text outside of the printable margins of your page or even to a different page. If you do so, however, the text affected by the Advance field will not print at all.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (12993) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Understanding the ADVANCE Field.