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Can MS Word 2010 Automatically remove Extra Space between Words?

MS Word grammar checker often says " Extra Space between Words:". I always click "Change" and continue with the grammar checker.

In the last 5 years this great feature has caught and fixed about 5000 extra spaces, but it is a little annoying.

Does anybody know of trick to make MS Word automatically eliminate these spaces? I sometimes use find and replace " " to " " but I would prefer that word just automatically make the correction.

rberke

SOLUTION

DrTribos

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ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Tapan Pattanaik

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Robert Berke

ASKER

The Autocorrect "From" textbox ignores leading and trailing spaces and does not accept wildcards, so that will not work.

The following macro seems to work, but I won't know for sure until I have used it for a few weeks.

I will post back and let you folks know how successful it was.

Bob

' In Word 2010 the F7 spell checker will frequently ask the user if double space should be replace a single space.
'
' if this is annoying, you can make replacement be automatic by using this macro. Customize the ribbon and use the "keyboard shortcuts" to assign the macro to Ctrl Shift F7.
'
If Options.CheckGrammarWithSpelling = True Then

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
With Selection.Find
.Text = "([ ])[ ]{1,}"
.Replacement.Text = "\1"
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindStop
.MatchWildcards = True
.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
.MatchWildcards = False
.Wrap = wdFindAsk
End With

ActiveDocument.CheckGrammar
Else
ActiveDocument.CheckSpelling
End If

End Sub

DrTribos

Glad you have progress 😊

Robert Berke

ASKER

The macro was working well, but I made a small improvement. This is the final version.

Sub Macro328()
' see experts-exchange question 28693441 from rberke

' In Word 2010 the F7 spell checker will FREQUENTLY ask the user if double space should be replaced by a single space. I always respond Yes.
'
' I found this to be annoying, so I created this macro. I customized the ribbon and used the "keyboard shortcuts" to assign the macro to Ctrl Shift F7.
'
' Now, whenever I want to spell check, I use control shift F instead of F7, and the annoying message never comes up.
'
'
If Options.CheckGrammarWithSpelling = True Then

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
With Selection.Find
.Text = "([ ])[ ]{1,}"
.Replacement.Text = "\1"
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue ' This causes the entire document to be processed, not just the selected text.
.MatchWildcards = True
.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
.MatchWildcards = False
.Wrap = wdFindAsk ' Return to "standard" behavior. Future find and replaces will ask if the entire document should be processed.
End With
ActiveDocument.CheckGrammar
Else
ActiveDocument.CheckSpelling
End If
MsgBox "The spelling and grammer check is complete."
End Sub