A tab is a special character that is entered into your document by pressing the Tab key. A tab stop is a specific location in the horizontal dimension of a document at which you want text to be aligned. Pressing the Tab key on the keyboard causes the insertion point to move to the right until it reaches the next tab stop. The space in between is left blank.
Tab stops are part of the paragraph format.
Tabs are useful for lining up columns and creating tables. In fact, the
word "tab" is short for "tabulator," a function of typewriters that
causes the carriage to move to preset positions in order to make it easy to type
information in the form of a table.
Copyright 1996 by the Curators of the University of Missouri