Many of us over a certain age endured a high school typing class on a (gasp!) real typewriter. Between nerve-wracking speed tests and paper jams, we were taught to put two spaces after periods in order to make individual sentences easier to identify. Today, the extra space is frowned upon, but those of us who survived an entire semester with one of those metal monsters may find it hard to break the two-space habit. If that’s you (and it’s certainly me), here is a quick tutorial on how to find and delete extra spaces in Word.
The images shown below are from Microsoft Word 2019; however, the steps are the same for Word 2016, Word 2013, and Word 2010.
Delete Extra Spaces Using Word’s Find and Replace Tool
1. Select the Home tab.
2. Select Replace in the Editing group.
3. Ensure you are in the Replace tab in the Find and Replace dialog box.
4. Place your cursor in the Find what text box and press the space bar twice to add two spaces. (The text box will appear empty.)
5. Place your cursor in the Replace with text box and press the space bar once to add one space. (The text box will appear empty.)
6. Select your preferred replacement option:
- Replace replaces only the current occurrence of a double space with a single space.
- Replace All replaces all the double spaces with single spaces. If you choose this option, a dialog box will appear telling you how many replacements have been made.
- Find Next locates the next double space in the document without replacement.
7. Select the Close button to close the Find and Replace dialog box when you are finished.
Note that you can also customize Word to flag extra spaces between words and sentences as you type and then correct each occurrence individually.
GREGG says
February 11, 2019 at 6:22 pmHello Erin,
I’m using MS Word 365 for MAC, vsn 16.23, copyright 2019. My MacBook Pro uses macOS Mojave vsn. 10.14.2.
I’m also using Safari to access your example at
https://erinwrightwriting.com/remove-extra-spaces-word-document/
I have not been able to reproduce your results for deleting multiple spaces between words in a doc.
E..g., I want to reduce eight spaces between two words to only four spaces, which occurs ten times in a doc.
That is, from “A (continues)” to “A (continues)””.
When I use “Find and Replace,” the spacebar does enter the correct number of spaces in both the “Find what” and “Replace with” boxes. However, the resulting pop-up notice always displays “No results found.” [Perhaps these are the only three English words it knows. ]
I’ve tried various approaches, such as (1) “Use wildcards”, (2) “Ignore punctuation characters”, (3) ignore white-space characters”, (4) ASCII 32 (Unicode F020) – but have had no success yet.
Lastly I’ve used both “Find and Replace” and “Advanced Find & Replace”. The only difference I noticed is that the former does not provide a pop-up notice when no action is performed.
Well, this is my woe, Erin. Can you provide any other options to accomplish my goal?
Thanks for the therapeutic “listening” (i.e., reading).
Gregg
Erin Wright says
February 14, 2019 at 12:33 pmHello, Gregg. Thank you for reading my post. I’m a PC user, so I’m afraid I can’t offer any suggestions. And, I hesitate to even offer a guess because my colleagues in the writing world frequently tell me that Word 365 for MAC operates under its own mysterious set of rules. Hopefully you can find someone who specializes in MAC? I wish you all the best!