How to Put an Underline in Word for a Resume (Every Method + When You Actually Should)

The quick answer takes three seconds: select your text and press Ctrl+U (Windows) or Cmd+U (Mac), or click the U button on the Home ribbon. Done.

But if you searched this, you are probably fighting one of the real battles: you want a clean line under your name or section headings like the polished resumes you have seen, your underline looks cramped and touches the letters, a mysterious horizontal line has appeared and refuses to be deleted, your email address turned blue and underlined on its own, or you are wondering whether underlining is even a good idea on a modern resume.

This guide covers all of it: the three basic underline methods, the styled underlines hiding in the Font dialog, the professional way to make section lines (which is not the underline tool at all), the famous line-that-will-not-die and its one-click fix, hyperlink formatting, and then the part most tutorials skip: the design and ATS strategy for when underlines help a resume and when they quietly hurt it.

Method 1: The Basic Underline, Three Ways

1. Keyboard: select the text, press Ctrl+U (Windows) or Cmd+U (Mac). Press again to remove it. Fastest, and worth making a habit alongside Ctrl+B (bold) and Ctrl+I (italic).
2. Ribbon: select the text, go to the Home tab, click the U in the Font group.
3. Before typing: press Ctrl+U, type, press Ctrl+U again to switch it off; the underline applies as you go.

To remove any character formatting you have tangled up, select the text and press Ctrl+Spacebar, which resets it to the style's default; keep that one in your pocket for the whole resume project.

Method 2: Underline Styles, Colors, and Words-Only

The plain underline is only the default. Select your text and open the Font dialog (click the small arrow in the corner of the Home tab's Font group, or press Ctrl+D):

• Underline style: a dropdown offers double, thick, dotted, dashed, and wavy lines. On a resume, resist the wavy ones; a single or, at most, a restrained double line under your name is the outer limit of taste.
• Underline color: by default the line matches the text; the dropdown lets you set, say, a dark gray line under black text, a subtle professional touch.
• Words only: the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+W underlines words but not the spaces between them, useful when a continuous line looks heavy.

One honest limitation: Word offers no built-in control for the distance between text and its underline, which is why tight-looking underlines under headings frustrate everyone, and why professionals use the next method instead.

Method 3: The Section Line Pros Actually Use (Bottom Borders, Not Underlines)

Look closely at well-designed resumes: the elegant line under "EXPERIENCE" or under the candidate's name usually is not an underline at all. It is a paragraph bottom border, which runs the full width (or the paragraph's width), sits at a comfortable distance below the text, and stays consistent everywhere. Here is the technique:

1. Click anywhere in the heading line (no need to select text).
2. On the Home tab, find the Borders button in the Paragraph group (a square divided into four).
3. Click its dropdown arrow and choose Bottom Border.

For more control, choose Borders and Shading at the bottom of that menu: set the line style, weight (½ pt to 1 pt reads professional; 3 pt reads like a road marking), and color. Because it is paragraph formatting, applying it to your Heading style once (right-click the style, Modify, Format, Border) gives every section the identical line automatically, which is exactly the consistency a resume needs.

The typing shortcut: on a blank line, type three hyphens (---) and press Enter, and Word's AutoFormat converts it into a full-width horizontal line (three equals signs makes a double line, three underscores a thick one). Handy, with a catch you are about to appreciate.

The line that will not delete, solved: that AutoFormat line, and any bottom border, is not a character you can backspace; it is a border attached to a paragraph, which is why clicking it does nothing and deleting around it fails. The fix: click in the paragraph directly above the line (or select the paragraphs around it), open the same Borders dropdown, and choose No Border. Gone. This one fix has saved more resume evenings than any other Word trick.

Underscores are the wrong tool entirely. Typing _______ to make a line breaks at the slightest edit, misaligns across systems, and parses as junk characters. Borders or nothing.

Method 4: Full-Width Lines, Tab Leaders, and the Name Header

• A line between sections (not attached to a heading): use the --- AutoFormat trick or a bottom border on an empty paragraph, then control spacing with Paragraph settings rather than empty Enter presses.
• Dotted lines that lead the eye to right-aligned dates (a classic layout): those are tab leaders, not underlines. Set a right-aligned tab stop at the margin (Home, Paragraph dialog, Tabs), choose a leader style, and type your job title, press Tab, type the date. Clean, editable, and it survives revisions.
• Under your name: a bottom border on the name's paragraph, ½ to 1 pt, sometimes in your accent color, is the signature look of a hundred professional templates. Pair it with bold and a larger size; skip the actual underline tool here, since underlined large text looks dated.

Method 5: The Hyperlink Underline (Blue Email Problem)

Type your email or LinkedIn URL and Word helpfully turns it blue and underlined. On screen that signals "clickable," which you may want; in print it is just blue noise. Your options:

• Keep the link, restyle it: select the link text and simply change its color to your body color and remove the underline (Ctrl+U); the hyperlink still works in the PDF. To fix all links at once, modify the Hyperlink character style (Styles pane, right-click Hyperlink, Modify).
• Remove the link entirely: right-click it, Remove Hyperlink (or Ctrl+Shift+F9 with the link selected on Windows).
• The modern resume convention: keep working hyperlinks on email, LinkedIn, and portfolio, styled to match your text, in the PDF you send digitally. Recruiters click.

Mac, Word Online, and Mobile Notes

Everything above works in Word for Mac with Cmd substituted for Ctrl (Cmd+U; the Font dialog is Format menu, Font; Borders live on the Home ribbon identically). Word Online covers the basic underline and the Borders dropdown, but hides the full Borders and Shading dialog and tab-leader controls, so build your resume's line system in the desktop app when you can. Mobile Word can apply basic underline from the formatting bar and is best treated as an emergency-edits tool, not a formatting studio.

Now the Strategy: Should Your Resume Underline at All?

Here is what the tutorials never tell you, and what actually affects interviews:

Underlining is the weakest of the three emphasis tools. Bold structures a resume (names, titles, headings); italics whisper (publication titles, foreign terms); underlines, in modern digital reading, mean one thing to every reader's reflexes: this is a link. Underline a job title and some readers will hover over it. The contemporary convention across professionally designed resumes is: bold for hierarchy, borders for section lines, italics sparingly, and the underline tool almost never touching ordinary text.

Where an underline (or its border cousin) earns its place: the line under your name in the header, the rule under section headings (as a border), and functioning hyperlinks styled per Method 5. That is essentially the complete list.

The ATS truth, plainly: underlines, bold, italics, and paragraph borders parse fine in applicant tracking systems; the folklore that "the ATS rejects formatting" confuses these harmless tools with the genuinely risky ones: text boxes, multi-column tables, graphics, and headers/footers carrying your contact info. (And as our knockout questions guide explains, instant rejections come from screening answers, not from an underline.) So underline decisions on a resume are design decisions, not survival decisions; make them for the human reader.

Consistency outranks every individual choice. One line weight for all section borders, one heading treatment, hyperlinks all styled the same way. A resume with three different underline styles reads as exactly what it is: formatting improvised under deadline. The full formatting doctrine (single column, standard fonts, no decoration doing a font's job) lives in our US resume conversion guide, and the list of things to delete before you polish a single line is in the resume etiquette guide.

Underline in Word FAQ

What is the underline shortcut in Word? Ctrl+U on Windows, Cmd+U on Mac; the same shortcut removes it. Ctrl+Shift+W underlines words only, skipping spaces.

How do I make a line under my resume headings like the templates have? Use a paragraph bottom border, not the underline tool: Home tab, Borders dropdown, Bottom Border, and set weight and color in Borders and Shading. Apply it to your Heading style once for automatic consistency.

How do I delete a horizontal line that appeared after typing dashes? It is a paragraph border, not a character: click in the paragraph above the line, open the Borders dropdown, choose No Border.

Why does my underline touch the bottom of the letters? Word cannot adjust underline distance; that cramped look is built in. Switch headings to bottom borders, which sit lower and can be spaced, and reserve true underlines for links.

How do I remove the blue underline from my email address? Right-click and Remove Hyperlink to kill it, or keep the link and restyle it: select it, set your text color, press Ctrl+U to drop the underline. The link still works in your PDF.

Do underlines cause problems with ATS software? No. Underline, bold, italics, and borders parse normally; the risky elements are text boxes, tables, images, and contact info in headers. Formatting choices here are for human readability.

Should I underline section titles or job titles? Convention says no: bold the titles, border the sections, and let underlines mean links. If you love the underlined-heading look, implement it as a border so it is spaced, consistent, and controlled.

Is there a way to underline blank space for a fill-in line? Use a bottom-bordered empty paragraph or a tab stop with an underline leader, never a row of underscores, which shift and break with every edit.

Three Seconds to Underline, One Decision to Make Well

Ctrl+U answers the question in the title; the border technique answers the question you actually had; and the design rule (bold for hierarchy, borders for lines, underlines for links) answers the one that affects interviews. Set your line system once in the styles, kill the stray AutoFormat borders with No Border, restyle the blue links, and your Word resume will hold its lines through every edit to come.

Or skip the wrestling entirely: MyCVCreator's templates come with the section lines, spacing, and hyperlink styling already engineered, ATS-clean and consistent, so you write the content and the formatting simply holds. Free to build.

Build your resume free →

Related reading:

US Resume vs International CV: The Conversion Guide ·

US Resume Etiquette: 10 Things to Delete ·

What Is an ATS Knockout Question?