Omid has a document with many "optional hyphen" characters. He wants to replace all of them with a "non-breaking space," so he wonders if there is a keyboard shortcut for entering the non-breaking space in the document.
The quick answer is that yes, there is a keyboard shortcut for non-breaking spaces: it is Ctrl+Shift+Spacebar. This shortcut has actually been covered in a different WordTip.
That being said, it still sounds like Omid may be going through the document and replacing all those optional hyphens manually. (Whether those replacements should be made at all is, I suppose, beside the point.) There is a much faster way to do the replacement using Word's Find and Replace capabilities. Follow these steps:
Figure 1. The Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
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2020-05-15 10:45:06
Malcolm Patterson
Step 2 is not correct. Shift+6 is followed by a hyphen, not a dash.
2015-11-09 09:00:22
Steve Dunham
"Whether those replacements should be made at all": that reminds me that a long time ago, I and another editor were working on a document, and the writer informed us that he had found a lot of things that looked like degree symbols between words (those were nonbreaking spaces we had put in), so the writer removed them. It reminded us editors of the famous image of peasants with pitchforks at Gonesse attacking a hot air balloon.
2015-11-09 02:59:11
Markus Koschinsky
In a very similar fashion you can create a non-breaking dash: Ctrl-Shift-'-'
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