Extra space after apostrophe

Anonymous
2010-07-19T19:31:29+00:00

Every time I type an apostrophe " ' " Word adds an extra space before the next letter.

For example, If I type don't, Word makes it come out Don' t 

Needless to say, this is annoying.  Does anyone have an idea how to make this problem go away?

Thnx

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2010-07-20T08:14:10+00:00

Hi RER

This sounds to me as if the language formatting may be set to something other than English. French, perhaps? Some languages require spaces before or after punctuation, so Word does this for the user. Which can be annoying if you aren't actually typing in that language.

At the bottom of the Word status bar you may see a little box with the language. If you don't right-click the status bar (that's the bar across the bottom of the Word windows,  in case you're not familiar with the term) and choose "Language" from the context menu. This will tell you the language formatting of the selected text.

If the text in the document is not an English "dialect", and you want the entire document to be in English, press Ctrl+A to select the document. Click on this "Language" button in the status bar, then select the language you want to use from the dialog box that pops up.

Cindy Meister, VSTO/Word MVP

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-03-22T00:10:37+00:00

    I had the same problem, tried every suggestion on this thread and none of them worked.  I found a solution on another thread elsewhere online- someone said to type CTRL 'Z' (UNDO) after typing the apostrophe and that worked for me to remove the big space.  It is an autoformat thing that word is doing and UNDO works to get rid of it.  But you would have to do it for every instance that you type the apostrophe unless you figure out how to change the autoformat options (which I don't know how to do).  Hope this helps.

    Thanks for your tip, ClarksJewelers.  I had the same problem too, but it only occurred in a table when I have the text direction going sideways.  When the text is horizontal, there is no extra space after the apostrophe.  Weird or what!  The fonts are normal ones like Arial or Times New Roman and using English (NZ) language.  This is a new phenomenon as I haven't had any trouble like this before. 

    I would also like to know how to fix this problem permanently so that I don't have to press Ctrl Z every time this happens.  Maybe it's a bug in Word itself.  I use Microsoft Office 365, a subscription product that automatically updates, on a Windows platform.

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-01-13T15:36:59+00:00

    This is the winner. Using v15 on Mac, I had 'Gadugi' font showing in Word (which I wanted to continue using). Found the free font download, installed it, relaunched Word, and voila! Working fine. Good job, mate!

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  3. Stefan Blom 352.5K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2015-11-27T10:01:40+00:00

    Note that if you want typographical quotes and you are getting the wrong ones, the underlying cause is usually language formatting (because quotation marks are language-dependent).

    There is an option called "Detect language automatically" in Word which can lead to language formatting problems, because it means that Word tries to guess the language at the insertion point and that task isn't always successful... To turn off "Detect language automatically," clear it at Review | Language | Set Proofing Language.

    Existing documents must be dealt with one by one. Select all the text, go back to the Language dialog box and (re-)apply the correct language.

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-11-27T01:50:42+00:00

    This worked for me--using Windows Word 2013.

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