The simplest kind of shift is a column shift. Column shifting moves all characters within the bounds without altering their relative spacing. Characters shifted past the bounds are deleted. That is, blanks are inserted at the bound from which the characters are being shifted, and the characters are deleted at the opposite bound. So, this shift is called a destructive shift because information shifts within column boundaries without regard to its contents, and can result in the loss of data with no error being noted.

If the UNDO mode was on before you entered the shift command, you can recover by using the UNDO command. Otherwise, you can use CANCEL.