Remove large spaces between paragraphs. Known ways to remove spaces between paragraphs in Word

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.

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.

When typing any text, various errors and typos are possible, and if it is very easy to mark an error in words, or Word itself will mark 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 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, Word stretched the last two words across 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

Good time everyone! In this article we will focus on analyzing spaces in the Word editor. Many have probably encountered this phenomenon when we align text in width and suddenly too large spaces appear between words. After opening a document, we can also unexpectedly observe large spaces between words. How to remove them will be discussed today.

The first thing that automatically comes to mind is to place the cursor at the end of the word before the space and press the “delete” key. In this case, it is assumed that the deleted word will pull itself up and stand up as it should. However, this was not the case. The word is pulled up, but is placed close to the previous one, and if they are separated by the “space” key, then it again goes to its previous position. How to properly remove this large gap will be discussed in the article.

How to remove width spaces between words in Word?

The first option is quite easy, but labor-intensive if there are a lot of spaces. To remove large spaces, use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+SPACEBAR.

The first thing you need to do is hold down the left mouse button to select the entire large space - from word to word.

After that, press the above combination and the large space will automatically become a standard one character. If the problem with large intervals is due to the fact that the lines were broken, in this case we do this. Open the “File” menu, the “Options” tab, and there we find “Advanced”. In the window that opens, check the box next to the line “Do not expand character spacing in a line with a break.”

Also, spaces can appear due to tab characters. You can find out by clicking the “Display Symbols” button on the toolbar.

After clicking this button, we will see the corresponding symbols on the page. They will appear as arrows pointing to the right.

In order to remove them, simply select these arrows with the mouse and press the SPACEBAR key.

Removing extra spaces in Word 2007 throughout the text

The options discussed above are good when there are few such large spaces in the text and you can gradually remove them all manually. But the text can be quite large, and there can be a lot of spaces. It will be very difficult to remove them this way. Or rather just as good, but very long and tedious.

You can perform an automatic operation for all large spaces at once using the AutoCorrect function. The replacement window is called up using the CTRL+H key combination, or by clicking the “Replace” button located on the right side of the editor toolbar.

As a result of one of these operations, a window will open in front of us in which we need to go to the “Replace” tab, and then click the “More” button.

In the newly opened window, find the line “Wildcards” and put a checkmark next to it. There is no need to change anything else. If there is only one space in the text, do the following.

Go to the “Find” line, place the cursor, press the “Space” key and write in this line (2;). This command means that if there are two or more spaces in the text, they will be removed. Next, go to the “Replace with” line, place the cursor and simply press the space bar. There is no need to write anything here.

After that, click the “Replace All” button. The program will perform the replacement, removing all unnecessary spaces. That's basically it. Good luck in mastering the Word editor. And finally, watch a short video on removing spaces.

As you can see, there is nothing complicated or tedious with extra spaces. You can easily remove them. See you again!

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 will not 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 is 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 the 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 look normal - 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". Place the copied tab character in the first one, and put a space in the second one. Click the "Replace All" button and all large spaces will be replaced with short ones.

Description of ways to reduce unnecessary distances between words - large spaces - in Microsoft Word documents, taking into account the specifics of performing these actions for versions 2003, 2007, 2010.

How to remove large spaces in Word 2010 and 2007

1. Large spaces between words in a document can be caused by the applied text alignment to fit the width of the page. If it is optional, you need to click the “Align Left” button on the formatting panel to change the alignment.

2. To remove duplicate spaces, use the “Replace” menu item on the control panel. In the Find and Replace dialog box that opens, enter two spaces in the first field and one space in the second. After this, you need to place the text cursor at the beginning of the edited text and click the “Replace All” button in the dialog box.

As a result, double spaces in the text are converted to single spaces, and the program will tell you how many such replacements were made. Press the “Replace All” button until the number of replacements made equals 0, because there can be not only two, but three, four or more spaces between the words of the text.

3. Sometimes large spaces between words can be caused by the use of other characters (for example, tabs, non-breaking spaces). You can identify characters that are not visible in normal mode using the “Display all characters” button, which looks like the “Pi” icon and is located on the control panel above the “Paragraph” group. After clicking it, you need to repeat the replacement operation, entering not a double space in the first field, but the copied separating character.

How to remove large spaces in Word 2003

The operation of eliminating extra spaces in Word 2003 is also carried out through the search and replace dialog, the work with which is described above for Word programs of newer versions. The differences are minimal.

Here this dialog box can be called up as follows: using the “Edit” menu item, select the “Find ...” command and go to the “Replace” tab in the dialog box that appears; or just press Ctrl+H.

To search for other spacing-increasing symbols, you need to enable the “Show all symbols” button, which is placed in version 2003 on the “Standard” toolbar in front of the zoom window (this button is often hidden, and in order to see it, you need to click the down arrow on the toolbar ). Found characters should also be converted to single spaces through search and replace.