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.
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13408) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016.
The First and Last Word on Word! Bestselling For Dummies author Dan Gookin puts his usual fun and friendly candor back to work to show you how to navigate Word 2013. Spend more time working and less time trying to figure it all out! Check out Word 2013 For Dummies today!
Want to assign some fancy characters to keyboard keys for characters you seldom use? There are a couple of ways you can map ...
Discover MoreWord uses keyboard shortcuts for all sorts of tasks. Sometimes you may create a shortcut that messes up one of the other ...
Discover MoreWant a great list that shows the purpose of each function key in Word 2007? Here's the detail you need!
Discover MoreFREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in WordTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."
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-'-'
Got a version of Word that uses the ribbon interface (Word 2007 or later)? This site is for you! If you use an earlier version of Word, visit our WordTips site focusing on the menu interface.
FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in WordTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."
Copyright © 2017 Sharon Parq Associates, Inc.
Comments