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
    2018-01-03T18:43:16+00:00

    Here's a new answer.  I went into File Options Proofing AutoCorrect Options and under AutoFormat, Replace:  I unchecked "Straight quotes" with  "smart quotes".  This did remove the space, but it also changed the look of the apostrophe.  I'm not sure that I will be able to leave this unchecked, but for now it worked. 

    It was also odd because initially the smart quote I was getting was the 'close' single quote, even though I had not used an open single quote in the text.  I should also say that this was inside a text box, if that makes a difference.

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