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
    2013-06-21T00:19:13+00:00

    This is the first and only answer on this thread that fixed my problem.  Others noted that there might have been a font change, but I didn't check that out because I hadn't changed the font. It turns out that there is a font change and mine is consistently a Chinese font (!), not MS Shell Dig 2.  Regardless, as you point out, simply selecting the text and resetting the font fixed it.

    Of course, this is a hassle because Word shouldn't introduce these extraneous fonts in a Microsoft-provided Memo template (I'm using "Advantage").  At least now I can clean up my documents and not get editing remarks back from my clients and colleagues.

    THANK YOU!

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-08-09T14:56:12+00:00

    Thanks! This was a great help!

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-01-12T21:01:48+00:00

    I've just been having this problem and your solution solved it for me - thank you!

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-06-24T00:06:35+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.

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    9 people found this answer helpful.
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