Underscoring blank spaces in Word for Mac

These are Apple product support sites. You should be addressing this Word problem in a Microsoft Answers community devoted to Mac users of Word. Here is the Word for Mac home & business community for you to participate.

With Word on the Mac (e.g. 16.94), you can manually create your signature effect like the following by pressing shift+_ as needed.

Next, you select all of that content and then, from the Word Insert menu > AutoText > New… and give your selected content a name (e.g. Signature Line). Then to test this AutoText feature, you remove that selected text from your Word document.

Next, you revisit Insert > AutoText > AutoText… and click the box preceding Automatically correct spelling and formatting as you type. You enter the name you gave that AutoText and then select it from the listing shown. That AutoText is then inserted into your document. That inserted Signature line is destructive as you type a name on it.

You can also just start typing the name of your AutoText name and you will see a floating display of it adjacent to your typing where you just press enter to automatically insert that AutoText item.

What you describe (Command-U, followed by a sequence of tabs) seems to work for me on Word 16.94/MacOS 15.4.

it's also the old-school way of doing it.

Far better to use a single tab with a leader for the line.

On your signature line, show the ruler and insert a tab marker at the point you want your line to end.

Double-click the tab marker to show the Tab Options window, and select the underscore leader:

Now all you need to do is type your label and a single tab to get the signature line where you want it. It will auto-resize if you change the label and is a far neater way to get what you want:

RDK_56 wrote:

=In that other world, I could turn on underlining, then hit as many tabs as I wished, or run the line out to the margin, so a line would show people where to sign and date documents.

That doesn't work with Word for Mac, & Word's support system doesn't address the problem.

Maybe try again to describe exactly what you are trying to do.

When I try to reproduce what you've described above, I get this:

As an addendum, Word 16.94 on macOS Sequoia will allow one to enter text, position two tables, one blank cell for the signature, and one cell in the other table that contains the Date: field — with only the bottom grid lines showing for each table. Then below the table, and left aligned, one can place an auto-expanding text box without a border for the printed name below the signature.

All of the spacing to tweak this can be done before selecting everything and then performing the AutoText entry as discussed in the preceding post. Upon inserting the saved name of this formatting, the entire signature block including the table will be inserted into the Word document just as you captured it with AutoText. This solution allows one to capture a non-destructive signature on the bottom gridline of the table.

Whether using your example, or the non-destructive line, gridless table suggestion in my follow-up post, the use of AutoText means never having to retype this underline solution again. One just looks up the name given to the AutoText item and Word inserts the formatted AutoText in the document for you.