Spacebar not working on Word/OneNote (iPad)

Anonymous
2020-05-05T23:52:09+00:00

Hello. I am using an iPad Pro with an external Magic Keyboard, and I came to notice (quite quickly) that on the Microsoft Office suite the spacebar is not working when pressed/clicked on the keyboard. So, I come to ask, is there a way to solve this? Because currently it is kind of useless to use Word/OneNote and not be able to press the spacebar and have a space between words.

I think its possible that the problem is present since the Magic Keyboard is brand new hardware and Microsoft Office Suite may not recognize it yet. And it is a big deal and problem for note taking or word processing in general.

EDIT: Spacebar works properly only when pressing Option + Spacebar, quite annoying to have to do a command just to correctly use the spacebar, seems like a bug to me.

The problem is present on an iPad Pro 2020 11” with the Apple Magic Keybard (Spanish - ISO) running iPad OS 13.4.1and the latest OneNote/Word version.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | iOS

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  1. Anonymous
    2021-03-19T19:20:47+00:00

    Hi,

    Sorry if this is a late response but I think I have your solution.

    If you go your full keyboard access settings, you can enter specific commands for some keys. If you scroll down to the settings for “activate”, you can see it’s been pre-programmed by the space button. You can clear that specfic demand and keep the rest of your commands turned on. No need to turn off full keyboard access when you clear this specific command. Just fixed my problem with onenote.

    Hope this helped you.

    Yes! Finally, I can do space and move the cursor with the arrows in OneNote. Thank you so much. I was going to return the Combo Touch keyboard!

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  2. Anonymous
    2021-02-22T09:20:40+00:00

    I think I found a fix.

    Go to Settings>Accessibility>Keyboards>Full Keyboard Access>Commands

    In here, you will see a list of commands and a keyboard shortcut key associated with it, there is one called “Activate” and the shortcut is the Spacebar. I changed this to Ctrl+Shift+R (a random combination) and saved it.

    It seems to work fine now on Onenote, no issues with Safari and Messanger. I have not tried it on Word, PowerPoint or Excel. I hope this helps :)

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-11-29T21:43:41+00:00

    OMG that worked!  Thank you thank you!!!!!

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-11-25T11:05:57+00:00

    Hello Mark,

    Thank you so much for the suggestion. That really helped!

    Regards,

    Roshan.

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-11-16T00:09:48+00:00

    Hi, 

    I had the same problem and this was how I solved in my ipad. I replaced the space key used in the accessability settings with other key combinations instead. This way I think it canceled the conflict between the accessability settings with onenote. Hope this helps.

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