Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated February 6, 2021)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Microsoft 365
Chris has noticed a behavior in Word in the last few months that he hadn't noticed before. Whenever he drags and drops a paragraph, Word inserts a leading space before the next paragraph after both the removal point and the insertion point. He wonders why Word is doing this and how he can stop it.
It appears that this behavior may be affected by two settings in Word. Follow these steps:
Figure 1. The Settings dialog box.
This should affect future dragging and dropping, but it won't affect anything you previously did in the document. To catch those, you may want to do a final "Find and Replace" when you are done editing. You can search for a paragraph mark (^p) followed by a space and replace it with a paragraph mark. That way you'll get rid of any unwanted leading spaces at the beginning of a paragraph.
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (10382) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Microsoft 365.
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