How do you create flush right dot leaders in Word?

Turns out you have to use the Tab style, but you set the tab type as Right, and then choose the dot leaders in front of it.

It's klunky, because (a) It doesn't calibrate off the right margin, so you have to manually tell it where to put that tab stop, and if later you should change your right margin you have to separately change the tab stop, and (b) once you've got the tab stop set there, you cannot type ordinary tabbed text into the document, as you might wish to do if you were creating, say, a program for a school Christmas play and wanted to indent some descriptive text (as Microsoft seems to prefer that you never do).

WordPerfect has a far better system. (Once again.)(Sigh.)

Many accept input in PDF form so I don't see why one would change. Then again I don't use Word but a varient called Open Office. Why? Check the price tag.

Bob

For my business and my wife's online graduate class work, MS Word is the required medium. It's a Microsoft world. . .

But did I mention the other way my wife found to do a table of contents with dot leaders? Just create it the easy way in WP, then copy and paste it to Word. It works perfectly, and strangely enough, it almost takes less time than doing it the Word way.
(And it feels better. . .)

*

That's one of the default styles for tables of contents, in fact.

So I let Word generate it from the headers in the document. That takes a few seconds (which is far less than typing it in WP, I assume, if that's what you mean with 'create'), and it has an added advantage that the page numbers change when the document changes. Use styles the Word way to change font etc.

In Word, try: Insert>Indexes and Tables>Table of Contents and choose the defaults (which is: show pagenumbers, right alignment, dots). Change the number of levels shown if necessary (but I'm happy with 3, generally). Couldn't be easier, not even in WP, I'd say.

This, by the way, is Word 2000. In later version, the dialogue might be changed (it starts with Insert>References in Word 2003) . But the functionality surely is there.

Some help and information:
http://office.microsoft.com/training/training.aspx?AssetID=RC011356771033
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/CH063554251033.aspx

Hope this helps.


Kees