To see the ruler while in Print Layout View. If you want to become an expert in Word and Microsoft Office or just simply expand your toolset slightly, view our course offerings for every level of experience. It will save you countless time and make your documents much easier to edit. The best way to format your documents and ensure preciseness is to use the ruler in Word. Whilst this may be okay for informal documents, if you are creating professional documents like reports and brochures, you will want to make sure that your formatting is spot on. Although some people use the space bar to format their documents, things rarely line up correctly.