Dealing with horizontal (design) lines

Adis

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When creating (invoice) designs, you may have to have horizontal lines somewhere. This can be easy as well as tricky. I d like to share some use cases from my experience.

Example 1:

Lets say you want to insert a line somewhere in your document. In this case, its a line in the footer that separates the footer from the above content on the page.

1: Insert a paragragh (enter)
2: Select a (Top) Border

3: Change the font size of the paragraph (seen in 1) to font size 1. Thats because we would like to have the horizontal line closer to the content of the footer.

HINT:
I could have also used a (TOP) border on the first line (Total Service), however, these lines will disappear on certain conditions, f.e. if no Service has been invoiced. Therefore, also the horizontal line would disappear, thats why you insert a paragraph above but change the font size.

Example 2:

On invoices you probably want to display something like the following.
This can be very simple by just selecting the according paragraph and insert a top\bottom border and a double bottom border for the invoice amount line.

However, lets say you dont have a tax, because its a reverse charge or you just dont want to display the lines Net amount and +20% Tax.
It should look something like this.

In the word format, I inserted a table with 4 lines, although its not straightforward when you look at it.

1: The first 3 lines are ranges in the format configuration. By doing so, I can control when the lines should be removed and when not.
The first line is the one with the Net amount - nothing special here.
The second line is the tax information line - nothing special here.
The third line is an empty with a top border.

The reason I put the top border on the third line and not on the second, is because I may have multiple tax lines. Because I dont want have a horizontal line after each tax line, but after all tax lines, I need an empty line with a top border - or to be precise, its actually a row as this is a table.

2: The fourth line is the invoice amount with a double bottom line.

Because I dont want the 3rd row to create a big space between row 2 and 4, by right click in the row, Table Properties, you can specify the row height. That means, the row, appears to consist of only a horizontal line, while we have full control when we want to display the row (horizontal line) and when not.

Finally, it looks like 3 lines, actually rows, although its 4 as the 3rd line is a very small row consisting of only a horizontal line.

Inserting horizontal lines can appear to be very simple, but can also consume a lot of time until you figure out how to implement it properly.

I hope it helps to save you some time.

Adis

My other blogs regarding Electronic Reporting – Tips and Tricks for Word Format => Blogs (dynamics.com)

Dealing with horizontal (design) lines

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