There are large spaces between words in width. How to reduce the space between words in Word

Large spaces between words in MS Word are a fairly common problem. There are several reasons why they occur, but they all boil down to incorrect text formatting or incorrect spelling.

On the one hand, it’s quite difficult to call too large spaces between words a problem; on the other hand, it hurts the eyes, and it simply doesn’t look nice, both when printed on a sheet of paper and in the program window. In this article we will talk about how to get rid of large spaces in Word.

Depending on the cause large indents Between owls, options for getting rid of them differ. About each of them in order.

This is probably the most common cause of too large spaces.

If your document has text aligned to fit the width of the page, the first and last letters of each line will be on the same vertical line. If there are few words in the last line of a paragraph, they are stretched to fill the width of the page. The distance between words in this case becomes quite large.

So, if this formatting (to fit the page width) is not necessary for your document, it needs to be removed. Simply align the text to the left by doing the following:

1. Select all the text or fragment whose formatting can be changed (use the keyboard shortcut “Ctrl+A” or button "Select all" in Group "Editing" on the control panel).

2. In a group "Paragraph" click “Align Left” or use the keys “Ctrl+L”.

3. The text will be aligned to the left, large spaces will disappear.

Using tabs instead of regular spaces

Another reason is tabs placed between words instead of spaces. IN in this case large indents occur not only in the last lines of paragraphs, but also in any other place in the text. To see if this is your case, do the following:

1. Select all the text and in the control panel in the group "Paragraph" Click the display non-printing characters button.

2. If in the text there are also arrows between the words, in addition to barely noticeable dots, remove them. If the words are written together after this, put one space between them.

Advice: Remember that one dot between words and/or characters means there is only one space. This can be useful when checking any text, since extra spaces there shouldn't be.

4. If the text is large or there are simply a lot of tabs, you can remove all of them at once by performing a replacement.

Symbol “End of line”

Sometimes placing text across the width of the page is prerequisite, and in this case you simply cannot change the formatting. In such text, the last line of a paragraph may be stretched due to the fact that there is a symbol at the end of it “End of Paragraph”. To see it, you need to enable the display of non-printing characters by clicking on the corresponding button in the group "Paragraph".

The end of paragraph mark appears as a curved arrow, which can and should be removed. To do this, simply place the cursor at the end last line paragraph and press "Delete".

Extra spaces

This is the most obvious and most common reason for large gaps in the text. They are large in this case only because in some places there are more than one of them - two, three, several, this is not so important. This is a writing error, and in most cases Word emphasizes such spaces with a blue wavy line (however, if there are not two, but three or more spaces, the program no longer emphasizes them).

Note: Most often, you encounter extra spaces in texts copied or downloaded from the Internet. This often happens when copying and pasting text from one document to another.

In this case, after turning on the display of non-printable characters, in places where there are large spaces, you will see more than one black dot between words. If the text is small, you can easily remove extra spaces between words manually, however, if there are a lot of them, this can take a long time. We recommend using a method similar to removing tabs—search and then replace.

1. Select the text or fragment of text in which you found extra spaces.

2. In a group "Editing"(tab "Home") press the button "Replace".

3. In line "Find" put two spaces in the line "Replace"- one.

4. Click “Replace all”.

5. A window will appear in front of you with a notification about how many replacements the program has made. If there are more than two spaces between some owls, repeat this operation until you see the following dialog box:

Advice: If necessary, the number of spaces in the line "Find" can be increased.

6. Extra spaces will be removed.

Hyphenation

If your document allows (but has not yet installed) word wrapping, then you can reduce the spaces between words in Word as follows:

1. Select all text by pressing “Ctrl+A”.

2. Go to the tab "Layout" and in the group "Page settings" select item “Hyphenation”.

3. Set the parameter "Auto".

4. Hyphens will appear at the end of lines, and large spaces between words will disappear.

That's all, now you know about all the reasons for the appearance of large indents, which means you can make the space smaller in Word yourself. This will help give your text a proper, readable appearance that won't distract attention. long distance between some words. We wish you productive work and effective learning.

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

Instructions

Start figuring out possible reasons excessively large spaces between words, for example, to check text formatting. If the text is set to align to the width of the document, then text editor makes sure 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 the problematic part of the 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 in the "Replace with" field put regular space. Then click the "Replace All" button.

If, when the display of non-printable characters mode is turned on, it turns out that the reason for too large spacing 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.

If Text Document It 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 whose continuation goes to next line, stretches across the 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 clicking right click to 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 "Replaced by:" one space, then press the button "Replace All" and repeat this procedure until the replacement results in zero objects.

Well last reason availability big gap between words, these are established hidden characters, for example, tab. To see all the hidden symbols on the sheet, you need to go to the tab "Home" select item "Show all characters".

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 be sure to 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 extra spaces between words.

Sometimes I come across documents in which the text is aligned in width (as if for a more beautiful display), but the words in the last line are stretched to the full width and appear between the words huge gaps. 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

You can change the indentation - the distance between paragraphs - on the left or right, as well as the spacing in the document. You can also increase or decrease the indentation of a single paragraph or group of paragraphs within margins.

Interval
	Specifies the spacing before a paragraph.
	Specifies the spacing after a paragraph.
Interline	Select single for single spacing. To quickly highlight a single space for an entire document, see Single Space in Document.
To set the line spacing for text to one and a half times the single line spacing, select 1.5 lines.
To set text to double line spacing, select Double. For information on how to quickly set double spacing for an entire document, see Double spacing in a document.
To set the minimum line spacing required to fit the largest character or graphic objects, select item Minimum and enter the value in the field meaning.
To set a fixed line spacing, expressed in points, select exactly. For example, if the text has a font size of 10 points, as line spacing you can specify 12 points.
To set line spacing as a multiplier expressed as a number greater than one, select Factor and enter the value in the field meaning. For example, if you set the line spacing to 1.15, the spacing will increase by 15 percent, and if you set the line spacing to 3, it will increase by 300 percent (triple spacing).
Don't add	If you don't want extra space between paragraphs, check the box Don't add space between paragraphs.

In this article

Indent the first line of a paragraph

Indent all lines of a paragraph except the first

You can create an indent, that is, add an indent not to the first line of a paragraph, but to subsequent lines.