Non breaking spaces in MS Word

Perhaps you've heard of non breaking spaces, perhaps not, but you certainly should know how to use them.

On occasion you may want to override the way MS Word wraps text at the end of a line.  For example, you may want a person's name and surname to always appear on the same line or perhaps the date and year are separating and you'd prefer they didn't.

Looking at this example the name (which I've highlighted to make it easier to spot) has wrapped onto two lines.

In order to force MS Word to keep the name and surname together, I've replaced a normal space between the name and surname with a non breaking space.  Easily done.  Simple replace the existing space with CTRL SHIFT SPACEBAR

Whilst this is not something you're likely to use on a very frequent basis, it's a great little trick to know.

My favourite ways to select text in MS Word

There are so many ways to select text, and we all have our favourites.... these are mine.

• a single word - double click over the word.
• an entire sentence  - Hold CTRL and click once anywhere on the sentence.
• the entire document - Press CTRL A
• a paragraph - triple click anywhere within the paragraph
• Irregular area - click once at the beginning of the area, hold your SHIFT key and then click at the end of the area to be selected

It's been a very MS Word focused set of tips over the last few weeks.  I hope you've found them useful, please share if you have.  I'll be working on some Excel tips next.

Removing all hyperlinks in a Word document

Nowadays we get so much information from other sources, but when we paste that data into Word documents, it often pastes with the hyperlink included.  You know... all blue and clickable as displayed in the picture below.

You probably know how to remove the hyperlinks by right clicking over them, but that can become tedious when you have quite a few spread throughout a long document.

An easy way to remove all hyperlinks is to press “Ctrl+A” which will select everything in the entire document, then press "Ctrl+Shift+F9"

This will remove all of the hyperlinks whilst still keep the original format of the text.

Let me know if there are any other topics you'd like to see featured in this Tips and Tricks blog and feel free to share this with others you think may find it useful.