Direction Arrows Confused

Pat reports that something really strange has happened with one of her documents. For some reason, the arrow keys have become confused. Pressing the Left Arrow moves the cursor right, while the Right Arrow goes left. Pat wonders why this would be happening all of a sudden and how she can fix it.

The first thing you'll want to do is to figure out if this is happening with just a single document. Open other documents on your system and see if the same problem exists there or not. If it is a single document, then check if the document contains two languages, one "left to right" and the other "right to left." For instance, if the document contains Hebrew or Arabic text, those are "right to left" languages, and within those languages pressing the Right Arrow will move the insertion point to the left and vice versa.

If it is a language issue, then Word is functioning just as it should. If it is not a language issue and the issue is with the single document, then there are only a limited number of reasons as to why it could be happening. The first thing to check is whether there are any macros associated with the document. It could be that the macros redefine the behavior of the arrow keys. If that is the case, then you can delete or edit the macros to make the behavior change.

The other possible cause is that the document is corrupted in some manner. Corrupt documents can display all sorts of strange behaviors, including keyboard quirks. If you suspect this is the case, then you'll need to go through some rather standard steps for dealing with corrupt documents. This WordTip can help in that regard:

https://wordribbon.tips.net/T013284

If the problem is exhibited on all documents on your system, then you need to take the documents and open them on a different system. If the problem is not evident on the other system, then you know the problem is probably hardware related on your system. You can verify that it is a hardware problem by checking to see if the arrow keeps misbehave in programs other than Word. If so, then shutting down your system and restarting. If that doesn't fix the issue, then shut it down again and swap out the keyboard for a new one to see if that takes care of the problem.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (11464) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Word in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Direction Arrows Confused.