Learn how to space between words in Word. How to remove large spaces between words in Word

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Well designed, formatted, looks attractive. Sometimes this is hampered by large distances between words, making it “holey”, interfering with aesthetics and causing inconvenience when reading. In addition, sometimes serious formatting is required when preparing documentation. And you have to think about how to reduce the space between words in Word.

There are several reasons for the appearance of such voids. When solving a problem, first find out the reasons for its occurrence. These could be hidden signs or you accidentally pressed the button twice. Below we will tell you why they form and how to remove large spaces in Word. The information is undoubtedly useful for novice users and more experienced ones who have had to deal with this task.

  1. You can find errors manually. To do this, on the “Home” tab, in the “Paragraph” section, activate “Display all characters”. All formatting symbols will become visible to you, the space looks like a dot in the middle between the words. If you see a double (two dots next to each other), you just have to remove one.
  2. In Word 2013, double/triple long spaces are highlighted as an error; you can fix it - remove the extra ones - by right-clicking on the highlighted error and selecting the desired option in the menu that appears.

These methods are quite inconvenient and time-consuming. Therefore, we recommend using an automated option that allows you to remove unnecessary items from the entire Word file.

  1. Remove quickly and easily extra spaces You can use the “Replace” function. In Word 2003 it is located on the “Edit” tab, and in Word 2007/2010 it is on the “Home” tab on the right, in “Editing”.
  • Click on "Replace".
  • In the window that opens, in the “Find” column, enter a double space.
  • In the “Replace with” column, put a single space.
  • At the bottom of the window, click the “Replace All” button.

The editor will notify you of the results in an additional window: “Word has completed searching the document. Number of replacements made:..." Repeat the procedure until the editor shows 0 replacements in the results.

  1. You can also see extra spaces using the spell check service on the website http://text.ru/spelling. Once you check there, you will see where they are (they will be highlighted by the program), then delete them in your Word document.

Invisible signs

The distance between words in a document can be increased by invisible characters. They usually appear after copying them into Word from the Internet. They can also be removed manually by opening them with the “Display all characters” button. If there are many such hidden characters, it is more convenient to remove them through replacement: after copying these characters, paste them into the “Find” column in the “Replace” window, leaving the bottom line empty (what we are replacing with).

Professional layout

You have large spaces between words and want to reduce them, for example, to reduce the number of lines. How to artificially reduce a space in Word so that it just becomes shorter?

  • Select the part of the text where you want to reduce the distance between words. Using the “Find” - “Advanced Search” function, open the window, enter a space there and click “Find in”.
  • There, select "Current Fragment". You will see all spaces in the selected text.
  • Activate the "More" button to add additional options. There at the bottom of “Find”, follow the links “Format” - “Font” - “Advanced” - “Spacing”.
  • In the list, click “Compacted”.
  • Install the seal you require, click OK.

The distance between words will decrease, the text in Word will shrink and take up less space.

Gaps between words, caused by copying text into Word and formatting it using the alignment function, reduce aesthetics. If you didn’t know how to remove long spaces in Word, try following the steps in our instructions, and you will see that it is not difficult, that you can format your texts yourself, and even do professional layout yourself.

If the text document was not typed by you, then you may be surprised by its design, for example, by the presence of large spaces. To deal with them, it is necessary to find out the reason for their appearance, for which we will next consider the question of how to remove spaces between words in Word.

There can be many reasons for the appearance of large spaces between words, and the most common of them is text alignment. With this alignment, each line, the continuation of which goes to the next line, is stretched in width from edge to edge, i.e. The first and last words on a given line are pressed against the edges of the sheet border. You can change the spacing between words in Word by choosing a different alignment method, for example, left alignment. You can find alignment options on the tab "Home" in the sector "Paragraph".

Large spaces between words in Vaudres can also appear when setting several spaces in a row, but in Word 2013, double or more spaces are considered an error and are immediately highlighted. You can remove large spaces between words in Word by right-clicking on the highlighted error and selecting the suggested autocorrect option from the menu. But this option is suitable only for isolated cases, since only the first double or more space found in the text is highlighted.

At large quantities If there are double or more spaces in the text, it is better to use autocorrect. On the tab "Home" find the point "Replace" and set up a replacement. In the column "Find:" two spaces should be specified, and in the column "Replace with:" one space, then press the button "Replace All" and repeat this procedure until the result of the replacement is zero objects.

Well, the last reason for the presence of a large space between words is set hidden characters, for example, tabs. To see all the hidden symbols on the sheet, you need to go to the tab "Home" select item "Show all characters".

There can be several reasons for too large spaces between words in Word documents - this may be a consequence of the formatting commands used for the entire text or individual blocks of it, or the use of special characters instead of regular spaces. Each of the reasons has its own methods of elimination, but if it is not possible to find out exactly the source of the defect in the text, you can consistently apply all the means.

Instructions

Start figuring out possible reasons excessively large spaces between words, for example, to check text formatting. When text is set to fit the width of the document, the text editor ensures that the first letters of the first words of each line are on the same vertical line, as are the last letters of the last words of the lines. To achieve this, the editor stretches the intervals between words in those lines where the number of characters is insufficient.

Highlight problem part text open document. If the spacing between words throughout the document needs correction, you can select it by pressing the hotkey combination CTRL + A (this is the Russian letter “F”). Once you've done this, click the left alignment command button - it's located on the Home tab in the Paragraph command group. You can replace clicking a button with pressing a combination CTRL keys+ L.

Check to see if tabs are used instead of spaces. To do this, enable the display of “non-printing characters” in the document - the corresponding button is located in the same group of “Paragraph” commands on the “Home” tab. Space characters will be indicated by raised dots above the baseline, and tab characters will be indicated by small arrows. If you find that these are the cause of the increased spaces, copy one of the tab characters and press CTRL + H to open the Find and Replace dialog.

Paste the copied space into the “Find” field, and enter a regular space into the “Replace with” field. Then click the "Replace All" button.

If, when displaying non-printable characters is enabled, it turns out that the reason for too large spaces is the presence of not one, but several spaces between words, then use the same search and replace dialog. Press the keyboard shortcut CTRL + H, put two spaces in the “Find” field, one space in the “Replace with” field, and then click the “Replace All” button. After that, press the same button again - in case there are not two spaces between the words, but more. Click the button until Word reports that the number of replacements completed is zero.

Before reducing spaces between words in the text, you need to find out the reason why they occurred. There may be several of them:

  • align text width;
  • extra spaces;
  • tabs between words or long spaces.

All these problems can arise, for example, due to copying text from the Internet. To bring the text into proper form, it is necessary to get rid of all the above reasons in order.

A common reason for large spaces between words is the alignment of text. With this alignment, words are evenly distributed along the entire length of the line by increasing the distance between them.

To change this, you need to do the following:


If the text formatting requirements indicate that width alignment is necessary, then the easiest way to reduce spaces is to set automatic word hyphens.

To do this you need:


If both methods did not work, then the problem was not with the text alignment. Perhaps it's a matter of extra spaces.

Extra spaces

You can remove extra spaces in the text manually, which will take a lot of time, or use the following algorithm:


At this moment appearance The documents should already be improved. If there is still extra space between words, then perhaps the text has special characters that need to be removed.

Tab characters

Sometimes there may be tabs between words instead of spaces. To detect it, you need:

  1. On the “Home” tab, go to the “Paragraph” section and click on the “Paragraph” sign; when you click it, all hidden characters are displayed. The tab will appear as a small arrow.

  2. Next, you need to perform the same sequence of actions as when replacing a double space with a single one. To do this, in the “Home” tab, in the “Editing” section, click “Replace”.

  3. In the window that appears, insert a tab character in the “Find” field. To do this, click “More”.

  4. Then – “Special”.

  5. Select “Tab character” from the drop-down menu.

  6. In the “Replace with” field, put one space.

  7. Click "Replace All".

Special characters

Between words, sometimes instead of a regular space there may be a long space or a non-breaking space. If you click show hidden characters, they will appear in the text as a circle instead of a dot.


To replace long spaces with regular or short spaces, you need:


Important! You can replace the regular space, which is placed using the keyboard, with a short space or ¼ space. But when standard size font (12 pt) the difference will not be very noticeable.

Sometimes it happens that after typing, several lines remain on the last page of a section, which is contrary to the rules of layout. According to standards, the sheet must be filled at least 1/3.

To fix this, you need to perform the following steps:

  1. Select the last paragraph of a section or better all chapter. In the second case, the changes will not be so noticeable.

  2. Right-click and select “Font”.

  3. In the window that opens, go to the “Interval” tab.

  4. Select “Compacted”, and in the value field enter the minimum value of 0.1 pt.

  5. If there is still text on the sheet, you need to increase the size until all the extra text is on the previous page.

Important! This method is also suitable for headings if one or two words are carried over to the next line. Another method: put a non-breaking space between words; to do this, use the keyboard shortcut “Ctrl+Shift+Space” or special characters in the “Symbol” tab.

Difference between Word 2003 and Word 2007

The information presented in the article is relevant for the Word 2007 version. The table shows the differences between versions of the text editor when formatting text.

ActionWord 2003Word 2007
Changing letter spacingFormat > Font >Home > Font > Spacing. Select "Condensed", enter a value, click "OK"
Find and ReplaceEdit > ReplaceHome > Editing > Replace
Insert special charactersInsert > Symbol > Special CharactersInsert > Symbols > Symbol > Other Symbols > Special Characters

Once you find out the reason for large spaces between words in Word, you can easily eliminate it. To do this, you need to use the built-in functions of a text editor and tidy up the appearance of the document.

You can also watch a thematic video on the topic of the article.

Video - How to remove spaces between words in Word

After downloading another Word document from the Internet or when entering text yourself, you may find that the spaces between words are quite wide. Sometimes this distance is so large that it simply hurts the eye. This problem is not uncommon, and there are enough ways to solve it.

In our article we will present four the simplest option. We'll talk about how to remove space between words in Word using left alignment, using a non-breaking space, and eliminating non-printing characters such as "End of line" and tabs. Read the article to the end to determine the method that is right for you. We will consider how to remove spaces between words in Word 2010, but it is likely that all methods may be suitable for other versions of the program.

Using a non-breaking space

Now let's talk about how to use it. However, before that, let's pay a little attention in the simplest way- left alignment.

The fact is that huge gaps can appear due to incorrectly specified text formatting settings, and sometimes regular left alignment can help. To do this, you can use the button of the same name on the taskbar or the combination CTRL+L. But, of course, this method is not suitable in cases where it is necessary to maintain the width alignment.

Now let's talk about how to remove spaces between words in Word when aligning by width. We will use a non-breaking space for this. It is done very simply by pressing the combination CTRL+SHIFT+SPACEBAR.

Knowing the right combination, you just need to replace all the wide spaces with non-breaking ones, after which the problem will disappear.

Remove "End of line"

Now it's time to touch on non-printing characters. Namely, such as "End of line". It is set when you press ENTER in combination with SHIFT. In this case, you will not make a paragraph, but start writing the text on a new line. If it is, then the previous line will simply stretch across the entire width of the sheet, thereby creating unnecessary spaces.

To visualize, you need to use the corresponding button on the toolbar. Its location can be seen in the picture in the article.

Click this button and you will be able to see "End of Line". It looks like an arrow bent to the left. It is similar to the one drawn on the ENTER key. To fix the problem with wide spaces, you need to erase all these characters.

Removing tabs

Among the non-printing characters there is one more - tab. This sign is set when you press the TAB key. Fortunately, this problem is as easy to fix as the previous one. Moreover, the ways to eliminate it are almost the same.

Now let's look at a way to remove the space between them if they were created by tabulation. To begin, visualize all non-printable characters. You already know how to do this, but if you forgot, then read about how to remove the “End of Line”. The tab character looks like an arrow pointing to the right. The method for eliminating it is similar to the previous method. You should simply remove all unnecessary arrows.

Quickly remove tabs

So we figured out how to remove the space between But I would like to touch on one more topic - what to do if there are a lot of tabs in the text? Do not delete each one manually - it will take a lot of time.

In fact, the solution is very simple - you can use the replacement in Word.

To do this, first open the corresponding window by pressing CTRL+H. You will see two fields: “Find” and “Replace”. As you might guess, you need to enter a tab character in the “Find” field. This can be done by copying. Well, put a regular space in the second field. Next, click “Replace All”, and all large spaces from the text will disappear.



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