Large gaps between words in Word. Ways to remove large spaces between words in Word

You don’t know how to use Word or have forgotten how to find any important function for text editing? If so, this article will definitely interest you.

During time, people often face the problem of large gaps. Below we will tell you how to correctly perform width alignment in Word, and how to use various functions in this program. So after reading short course you will be able to successfully perform all the work you need.

First, let's define what such an expression as “width alignment” actually means. This is how your finished text will appear on the page. Indeed, in addition to width alignment, there are three more types of its distribution:

• on the left edge;
• in the center;
• on the right edge.

And each of them has its own algorithm of actions.

How can I align text in width?

So, in order for you to successfully complete the width alignment process, you need to do the following:

1. Click anywhere in the paragraph of your text that you need to align.
2. Now find the “Home” tab at the top of the Word page. It has five subgroups ("Clipboard", "Font", "Paragraph", "Styles", "Editing"), among which you need to pay attention to the "Paragraph" group.
3. After moving to this group Find the “Fit to width” button in it and press it immediately.
4. Your text is now aligned.

How not to align text

You don't need to use the keyboard's Spacebar or Tab buttons to align. Since this will take you a lot of time, and the main width of the text will be either larger or smaller.

How to remove spaces after alignment

It should be noted that as soon as you finish the job of aligning the text to the width, your concern will not end there, since you may well have large spaces between words. But this problem is also extremely easy to fix. Below we offer you several methods that will help answer the question - how to remove spaces when aligned by width.

Reasons for large spaces in text

Before moving on to eliminating large gaps, it would be wise to determine the reason for their occurrence, since each of them has its own individual way of solving it.

There are several reasons for this problem:

1. Large gaps may occur due to the use various teams when performing line width alignment.
2. They appear due to the use of special characters instead of spaces.
3. Formatting text or some parts of it after justification can also cause this problem.
4. If you typed the "End of Line" character and then pressed the ENTER+SHIFT keys, then you will experience automatic transition on the next line of your text, after which large spaces are formed.

Tricks for closing large gaps

If you are unable to determine what exactly is the origin of these largest gaps, then simply follow all the elimination techniques suggested below. And remember the above reasons for the future, so as not to accidentally put in the text big gap.

Removing Large Spaces

The first way to solve this problem is that you simply need to remove the large spacebar and put a normal one in its place; to do this, you need to simultaneously press three buttons on the keyboard of your computer: SHIFT + CTRL + SPACEBAR.

Hyphenation

In order to get rid of large spaces in the entire text at once, you need to:

• select it completely;
• after that, go to the “Page Layout” tab;
• There, find the “Hyphenation” tab and click “Auto”.

After this the problem will be solved.

Tabulation

Find out if tabs were used instead of spaces. To do this, you need to enable the display of “non-printing characters” in the text. To perform this action you must do the following:

• go to the “Home” tab;
• in the “Paragraph” group, click the “Non-printable characters” button (¶).

After completing the steps presented, all non-printing characters will be displayed in the text, and you will be able to find out whether tabs are causing the problem.

If so, then you just need to copy one of them and press CTRL+F, after which you will have a replacement window. In the first field of this window, insert text with a large space, and in the second - the text created by pressing three buttons on your keyboard SHIFT + CTRL + SPACEBAR. After that, you need to click on the “Find and Replace” button.

After completing all the above steps, the replacement will be made and large gaps in the document will disappear.

Inter-sign intervals

If large spaces are caused by character spacing, then you should do the following:

• V top menu find the “File” tab;
• then follow it;
• in the menu that opens, select the “Settings” tab;
• after that, you will have a table with parameters, and you will need to select the “Advanced” item, and in it check the “Do not expand inter-character spacing in a line with a break” checkbox.

Conclusion

After reading this article, you learned how to correctly perform width alignment in Word. Now, when you need to perform the named action when editing your text, you can solve all the problems yourself. Also, now you can identify all the causes of the so-called large gaps and eliminate them yourself.

Do you need to quickly correct a document with a lot of incorrect spaces and other characters? Thanks to the resources of Word, you can do this in just a few minutes.

Large spaces in the text can occur for various reasons, for example, due to incorrect formatting or the use of special characters. Moreover, the spacing between words in Word can be different both throughout the text and in its individual parts. There are a number of possibilities to correct the situation in Word.

Checking text formatting

The text can have text justification active. In this case, the editor automatically sets spaces between words. Justification means that all the first and last letters on each line should be located on the same vertical line. This is impossible to do with equal spaces, so the editor increases the spacing between words. Most often, text in this format is not very well perceived visually.

Align text left

Using this function, the text becomes less visually attractive, but all spaces that are set are immediately the same size. Follow these steps:

• Select the text where the spaces are not equal (if this is the entire document, then select it with the keyboard shortcut “Ctrl+A”);
• Then, in the “Paragraph” section of the Control Panel, on the “Home” tab, click “Align Left” or use the “Ctrl+L” hotkey.

Removing tabs and special characters

It is possible that non-standard spacing was caused by the use of tab characters (Tab key). To check this, enable the "non-printing characters" feature. You can also enable it in the “Paragraph” section. By pressing the button, you will see small dots appear in place of all the spaces. If your text contains tabs, a small arrow will appear at those locations. One or two spaces can be removed by simply pressing the “BackSpace” key. If there are a lot of tab characters, it is better to do it differently:

• Copy any tab character;
• Activate the “Find and Replace” function by pressing the “Ctrl+H” hotkeys;
• In the window that opens, on the “Replace” tab, in the “Find” line, insert this character (or press “Ctrl+H”);
• In the “Replace with...” line, enter one space;
• Click the "Replace All" button.

All tabs in the text will automatically be replaced by a single space.

If, after activating the non-printing character mode, you see that the reason for large spacing in the text is large number spaces, use the same Find and Replace function. First, enter two spaces in the “Find” field and perform a search. Then three, and so on, until the number of replacements completed is zero.

Formatted files

DOC and DOCX files can use advanced editing. Open the file in Word and make the required settings. For example, instead of a single space, you can set a double space. You can also use special characters, such as long space/short space, 1/4 space. To insert such characters throughout the document, use the same hot keys to open the Find and Replace window. By default, there are no special characters there, so you first need to insert such a character into the text, copy it from there and then paste it in the search and replace window. Where can I get the space pattern? To do this:

• Open the “Insert” tab on the “Control Panel”;
• Click "Symbol", then "Other";
• Go to the section " Special characters" and find there the right sign space;
• Paste it into the text.

The resulting sample can be immediately cut by pressing the key combination “Ctrl+X”. It can then be pasted into the required field.

Working with html code

If you need to change spacing not in Word, but in a web document, this operation is even easier. The code has special function, called word-spacing. With its help, you can set a certain interval for the entire document. To do this, you need to insert the following between the head tags:

Instead of 30px, you can set any other pixel value.

How to change letter spacing

While working with Word, you may also need to change the spacing between letters. This can be useful if you need to somehow highlight a specific piece of text. Such intervals can be sparse or dense.

Changing spacing in Word 2003

To set a different letter spacing, follow these steps:

• Go to the “Format” section and click “Font” (or the keyboard shortcut “Ctrl+D”;
• Open the "Interval" menu;
• Press "Enter".

Changing spacing in Word 2007

Use the following algorithm:

• Go to the “Home” menu, then to the “Font” section;
• Open the “Interval” tab;
• Check the box “Sparse” or “Dense” and enter the required digital value;
• Press "Enter".

If you need a similar function constantly, you can set hotkeys for sparse and compact intervals.

• Open the “Tools” menu and go to the “Settings” window;
• Go to the “Keyboard” section;
• In the “Categories” item, click the “Format” line, and in the “Commands” item - the “Condensed” (for compacted intervals) or “Expanded” (for sparse intervals) line;
• Specify keyboard shortcuts by pressing them on your keyboard.

• Open the "Options" menu and go to the "Settings" window;
• Click "Categories" and select "All Teams";
• In the “Commands” item, select the “Condensed” or “Expanded” line and specify a key combination for them.

Even if you opened text file and saw complete chaos, putting everything in order will not be difficult. By performing all the described steps in turn, you can remove unnecessary intervals. And you can apply the acquired knowledge in the future.

In most cases, working in Word does not raise any questions for the user. And what questions can there be if the program is, in general, simple, with a clear and accessible interface. However, no one is immune from failures, and sometimes incomprehensible situations still arise. At the same time, sometimes an experienced Word user cannot cope with them, so what can we say about beginners.

Method one

As usual, there will be several options for solving the problem, and I will start with the simpler one, in my opinion. To remove the huge space between words that appears out of nowhere, do the following. First, delete it, for example, or use the button. Now you need to simultaneously press three keys on the keyboard, namely: ++spacebar. After you do this, a normal one will appear in place of the huge gap, just as it should be.

Method two

Most often, such double spaces occur when text is aligned to the width of the sheet. If this point is not important for you, it is better to choose left-aligned text, which will allow you to avoid a similar situation in the future.

Well, from theory to practice: what should you do if a huge gap has already appeared in your text, which spoils the aesthetic appearance document? Let’s use, which is located in the “Home” tab, in the “Editing” subcategory. There is a “Replace” button, click on it.

After clicking on it, a window with two empty fields. It’s easy to guess that in the “Find” field you must enter two spaces in a row, and in the “Replace with” field - one space. Now that after aligning the text, there are two spaces between words in the text, text editor will automatically correct them to one.


As it turns out, the big gap isn’t as bad as it seemed before, right? As you can see, the problem can be solved easily and does not require special knowledge and skills from the user.

Video to help

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 a sufficient number of 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 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. For this we will use non-breaking space. It is done very simply by pressing the combination CTRL+SHIFT+SPACEBAR.

Knowing the desired combination, you should just replace all 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 text with new line. If it is, 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 in left side. 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 placed 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.

There may be several reasons why there are large spaces between words in Word. In this article I will tell you about some ways to solve this problem.

Aligning text to width

If your document does not require text to be aligned widthwise on the page, the first letters of each line are on the same page. vertical line, like the last ones, you can align all the text to the left. To do this, select the desired fragment with the mouse, or everything printed by pressing Ctrl + A (hereinafter, all key combinations use english letters). Then on the “Home” tab, click on the button "Align text left" or Ctrl+L .

Tab characters

Sometimes tabs can be the cause of large spaces between words. To check whether they are used in the document, you need to enable non-printable characters: click on the icon that looks very similar to Pi. Tab stops in the document are displayed as arrows. If there are any, delete them and add spaces. Spaces in non-printing characters are displayed as a dot: one dot - one space.

If there are a lot of tab characters, you can perform a replacement. Place the cursor at the beginning of the desired fragment. Then we select one tab character, i.e. arrow, and copy it – Ctrl+C; press Ctrl+H and in the window on the “Replace” tab in the “Find” field, place the cursor and press Ctrl+V. In the “Replace with” field, put a space. Click the “Replace All” button. Next, an information window pops up showing the number of replacements performed.

End of line sign

If you have all the text selected in width and cannot be edited in any other way, and the last line of the paragraph is very stretched, then perhaps at the end of this line there is an “End of Paragraph” icon. To begin with, we turn on non-printing characters - “End of paragraph” is displayed as a curved arrow. If you have one at the end of the line, then simply delete it: place the cursor at the end of the last word of the paragraph and press “Delete”.

Spaces

This option is also possible: you copied something from the Internet, but between the words there is not one space, but two or three, so the distance is increased. When non-printing characters are enabled, there should be several black dots between words. It takes a long time to remove them throughout the document, so we’ll use a replacement. Press Ctrl+H, put two spaces in the “Find” field, one space in the “Replace” field, click “Replace All”. If necessary, you can put three, then four, etc. in the “Find” field. spaces, and replace them with one.

Word wrapping

If the document allows the use of word wrapping, then the distance between words can be edited in the following way. Select all the text Ctrl+A, go to the tab "Page Layout". V "Page Options" Click on the transfer icon and select “Auto”. As a result, hyphens are placed throughout the text and the distance between words is reduced.

In this article we tried to remove large spaces between words in Word. I hope it worked out for you.