Large spaces between words. Three ways 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 spaces between words in Word using left alignment, using 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

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, in the second field put regular space. Next, click "Replace All" and that's it. large spaces will disappear from the text.

When typing any text, various errors about typos and if it is very easy to mark a mistake in words, or Word itself marks the wrong word, then it is difficult to see where in your text there are several spaces between words. You can manually view all the text with the display of special characters enabled, but this is very inconvenient and time consuming. The same process of finding and eliminating extra spaces can be automated and how to do this is described later in the article.

A few spaces between words look like the image below. To enable the display of spaces, click on the icon for displaying special characters on the toolbar in the “Home” tab. In addition to two spaces, there can be 3 or more spaces between words. Each space in special characters is a separate period.

Extra spaces in Word look like several dots in a row

To automatically remove extra spaces in Word, you need to use the search and replace tool. Click on the “Replace” item in the “Home” tab, or you can press the key combination Ctrl+H. In the “Replace” tab, in the “Find” field, you need to enter two spaces in a row (they are not visible when printing), and in the “Replace with” field, enter one space. After that, click on the “Replace All” button. Word, after clicking “Replace All,” will look through the entire text from beginning to end and wherever it finds two spaces in a row between words, it will replace them with one space. This operation will be performed once throughout the text, and if you have more than two spaces anywhere, Word will replace only the first two with one.

To remove extra spaces, you need to use the Find and Replace tool to replace two spaces in a row with one.

To ensure you get rid of all the extra spaces, perform the same search operation and replace two spaces with one until the message “Done” appears. Number of replacements made: 0.”

After this, your text will definitely not have any extra spaces between words.

Sometimes I come across documents in which the text is justified (as if to make it look nicer), but the words in the last line are stretched to the full width and there are huge spaces between the words. Very often, Internet users ask on forums and blogs how to remove spaces when aligning by width. The problem in most cases is not in the text width formatting itself, but in the special character that appears at the end of the problematic paragraph.

The stretched text looks like this:

As you can see the last two words Word stretched over the entire line by increasing the space between these two words. In 90% of cases, replacing the special character at the end of the paragraph with a cursor translation (this is Enter) will help you.

To see what kind of symbol is located after the dot, click on the icon for displaying special characters on the main tab. And as you can see, instead of an ordinary space, I have a forced line feed character.

A problem that in most cases causes the last words of a paragraph to stretch out with a lot of space between them.

We delete it and press “Enter” instead. As you can see, Word automatically distributed the formatted text across the width and did not add extra space between words.

What to do if text copied from the Internet is not aligned in width

In documents of the format Microsoft Word or, in other words, in Word quite often there are large spaces between words. However, many documents require strict formatting. Therefore, when working in Word, it is useful to know how to remove large spaces quickly and easily.

Ways to eliminate spaces in Word

1. The most common reason for large spaces between words in Word is the alignment of the text. If this is not prerequisite formatting text, you can select all the text or a fragment of it and make the alignment “Left”. To do this, click on the “Home” tab button with horizontal lines aligned to the left.
2. Another way to remove extra spaces is to use the Replace function. In Word versions from 2007 and 2010. it is located on the right side of the control panel on the Home tab. In Word 2003, the “Replace” function must be called through the “Edit” tab. When you click on “Replace” a dialog box will appear in front of you. In the “Find” column you should put two spaces, in the “Replace with” column - one space. After that, you click "Replace All". The procedure should be repeated until the editor replaces all repeating spaces with single spaces and shows you 0 as the result of the replacements.
3. Large spaces between words in Word can create not only double spaces, but also other invisible characters. In order for them to become noticeable, you need to click the “Display all characters” button, which is indicated as “Pi” and is located on the control panel in the “Paragraph” section, on the “Home” tab. Once all the invisible icons are visible to you, you can copy them one by one and paste them into the Replace dialog box. In this case, you paste the copied character into the “Find” line, and leave the “Replace with” line empty and fill it with a single space.

When typing text or in a downloaded file in Word, you may notice that there are large spaces between words. Don't be alarmed, this is normal and completely fixable. In our article we will try to figure out why this happens and how to remove large spaces in Word.

Justification

If we look at how to remove large spaces in Word, the first thing we need to talk about is the problem with alignment. After all, it is the most common one. Although its essence lies in the little things, and users make mistakes simply out of carelessness. But first things first. Let's figure out how to remove large spaces between words in Word if the problem is with the width alignment.

There are two solutions. Let's start with the one that turns out to be the simplest. Try changing the alignment - instead of the "justified" option, select "left". Of course, it is possible that this method won't work. After all, often the problem lies in the formatting of the file. Or it may be that this alignment does not suit you. Then use the second method.

The second method is that we will use hotkeys: CTRL+SHIFT+SPACEBAR. Who doesn’t know, the combination of these keys gives that very short space bar. All you need to do is replace large spaces with short ones.

Problem with non-printable end-of-line character

We have already figured out how to remove large spaces in Word if the cause is incorrect alignment. But although this problem the most common, it is not the only one. Now we will analyze the situation when the “hero of the occasion” is a non-printable “end of line” character.

We won’t rant about what an unprintable sign is and why it is needed in Word; it’s better to get straight to the point. First of all, you will need to enable the display of these same symbols. This is done by clicking on the corresponding button, which is located on top panel, in the "Home" tab. However, you can see its location in the proposed image.

By clicking on this button, you will see all non-printable characters, including the “end of line”. It is this symbol that does us harm. It looks like a curved arrow pointing to the left. All you have to do is remove it. After this, the spaces are normalized.

So you’ve learned how to remove large spaces in Word when the problem lies in the non-printable “end of line” character. By the way, this sign is placed when you press the SHIFT+ENTER key combination, so be careful not to accidentally place it.

Tab problem

Large spaces can also be caused by tabulation. We also won’t go into what it is. I just want to say right away that this sign is again non-printable, and it is placed when you press the TAB key.

You might have already guessed that since this character is non-printable, its removal occurs, as in the previous example, by displaying non-printing characters. That's exactly how it is. Turn on display and look for short arrows pointing to the right in the text. This is tabulation. Like last time, you need to change all these arrows to spaces, and the text will become normal look- large spaces will disappear.

Replacing large spaces with short ones

So, we have learned the last, third way to remove large spaces in Word text. But what to do if there are an unimaginable number of tabs throughout the text. Agree, few people want to remove them one by one on their own. That is why we will now present a method that will help you instantly change all these characters to the short spaces we need.

Probably everyone has heard about “Replacement” in Word. This is the function we will use. To begin, copy one tab character to the clipboard (CTRL+C). After that, run "Find and Replace" (CTRL+H). There will be two fields: "Find" and "Replace". In the first place place the copied tab character, and in the second place a space. Click the "Replace All" button and all large spaces will be replaced with short ones.

It is worth raising the question of how to remove the gap between words in Word. It should be noted that large intervals can arise for various reasons. This includes formatting incorrectly, as well as using special characters.

Often this problem occurs in separate parts text, but can be observed throughout the document.

Checking formatting

First, it is recommended to make sure that justification is active. When this option is enabled, the editor must format the document in automatic mode. Using width alignment, the first and last letters rows are placed on a common vertical. As you know, this is impossible with equal intervals between words, so they increase. As a rule, visual perception of such text becomes more difficult.

On one side

To solve the problem of how to remove large spaces between words in Word, it is suggested to use the “Left Align” function. This makes it possible to set an equal distance. Thus, the following actions are performed:

1. The text that requires processing is selected (you can press the Ctrl+A key combination if you need to change the formatting throughout the document).
2. Go to the “Home” tab located in the editor control panel.
3. The “Paragraph” section opens.
4. Use a special function for alignment or use the corresponding Ctrl+L key combination.

Removing special characters and tabs

To solve the question of how to remove large spaces between words in Word, you should make sure that the Tab button has not been used in the text. To do this, you must enable the indication of non-printable characters. You will need to visit the “Paragraph” section. When you use this feature, you can see how small dots appear in place of the spaces. Where a tab is used, there is an arrow. To fix the problem, use the BackSpace key in several text fragments. If we're talking about about mass formatting, you will need to use other methods.

Instructions

To eliminate the gap between words in Word, you need to copy any of the tab characters. Then you need to activate the search and replace function by pressing the key combination Ctrl + H. After this, in the new window you should go to the “Replace” tab. Next, you will need to insert the character that was copied earlier in the “Find” column and enter one space in the “Replace with” item.

The next step is to click on the “Replace All” button. After the required action has been completed, you need to reactivate the non-printing character mode. If there is an indication that the cause of large gaps is extra spaces, you should proceed in a similar way. IN in this case The search and replace function is used. You must enter two spaces in the “Find” column and perform a search. Then you need to specify three spaces and perform the same actions. In the future, you should continue to increase the number of indentations until a solution to the problem is obtained.

When using DOC or DOCX files, you can use advanced editing. To do this, open a document in Word and make the required settings. It is worth noting that performing a similar operation in web documents is not difficult. There is a special word-spacing function in their code. It allows you to set the desired spacing between words in a document. In addition, it is proposed to make changes to the letter spacing, if necessary.