Suzanne - Thanks for the suggestion, however the dots are
the same color as the text - black.

Suzanne - Perhaps the following might help to solve this
mystery: the document was forwarded to me so it did not
originate on my pc. It seems there are several (new to me)
styles used in this document (it is an e-learning course
outline), and it appears that there has been some content
pasted from a ppt in the table cells. The formatting is
inconsistent due to the many styles the author used. The
document is a two column table with muliptle rows and
headings. I turned on Show/Hide Paragraph so I could see
why the document wasn't behaving as expected (bullets not
appearing when pressing Enter, for example). Other than
that, I had no problems adding text to the document until
I clicked behind some text near the end of the doc to add
more text, in the right hand column. The cursor would not
display there despite many clicks and tab key presses. It
stayed in the left hand column. I closed the document and
reopened it. After clicking behind the text where I wanted
to add more text (in the right hand column), the cursor
appeared. Now when I type in the doc, the dots appear
under all text entry. This does not happen in any other
document I create. Copy/pasting the entire document into a
new one copies everything - dots and all. I don't want to
have to retype this document. Your thoughts?

Hi val

What you say seems to confirm what Doug was trying to tell you. You have
your text formatted as hidden font. When you toggle off, the hidden text is
hidden. When you are toggled on, you see it with dots underneath.

You can unset the hidden attribute from Format > Font.