Word 'spaces'

authorMAF

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Ok, so I've got this really annoying problem, which I am really hoping someone will be able to help me with, but it's a little difficult to explain, so please bare with me! ;)

I copy/paste each of my chapters into a new document, where I then edit it, and then re-copy/paste back into my main manuscript. Now when I click the button to show paragraph marks and other hidden formatting symbols, I'm not getting the small dot between each word to show a space, but a small circle instead. This wouldn't bother me if it didn't make my text all weird (again, hard to explain, but there are some large spaces between some words when they come to the end of the line, and I have to backspace and manually space again to get rid of that huge space...makes sense?)

Does anyone know how to fix this without me having to manually backspace and press the space bar?


p.s. I have Microsoft Home and Student 2010 (liscence, non-commerial use)
 

darkelf

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It sounds like your spaces were turned into non-breaking spaces. This would make Word think that all your text is one big long single word. Non-breaking spaces act more like letters than spaces.

To fix it select one and copy it (ctrl-c) then go to find/replace (I have no idea where Microsoft moved it to) and paste that space in the find box, and put a normal space in the replace box.

I don't know how this happened, unless some sort of compatibility mode was turned on, or you went through some other program. I stopped using Microsoft Word (and the others) when they switched the menus (was that 2007?)

Let me know if this helps.

darkelf
 
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