Unlike tabs on a typewriter, which are set at fixed intervals all the way across a page, tabs in a word processor are variable. Your word processor may come preconfigured with soft tabs every half inch, but it's usually best to set your own tabs stops so that there is only one tab between each set of characters. To create a new tab stop, drag a tab from the tab well onto the ruler, or use the appropriate dialog box. Once you've created a tab stop on the ruler, you can use the Tab key on your keyboard to insert a tab character. When you do this, the text that follows the tab character is aligned to the tab stop.
Decimal tabs are for aligning the decimal points of numbers, instead of their edges.
In this way, tabs can take the place of simple tables in word processors with poor support for tables. When making a table of contents, you can use tabs with leaders to automatically fill dots, dashes, or solid lines between the end of your table of contents entry and the beginning of the page number. Another useful word processor feature is the ability to set the amount of space automatically placed before and after each paragraph. If your word processor has this feature, you should never need to insert blank lines between paragraphs to get the proper spacing. Setting this directly in the paragraph's properties saves keystrokes, makes the spacing consistent throughout the document, and makes it easy to globally adjust the interparagraph space if you need to squeeze your document onto a fixed number of pages, for instance.