spacing between words

[Guest]

I am editing a long document I have not created. When I added a word to a
paragraph ms word adjusted the spacing between the words. It now looks like
there is room for 3 or 4 letters between these words. I can't shrink the
space to a reasonable size. My cursor just tabs to the next word.

I've looked in the book for paragraph formatting and spacing and can find
only information on line spacing.

 

[Jay Freedman]

I am editing a long document I have not created. When I added a word
to a paragraph ms word adjusted the spacing between the words. It now
looks like there is room for 3 or 4 letters between these words. I
can't shrink the space to a reasonable size. My cursor just tabs to
the next word.

I've looked in the book for paragraph formatting and spacing and can
find only information on line spacing.

The paragraph may have "Justified" or "Distributed" formatting, which are
different ways of getting the text aligned along both the left and right
margins.

With the cursor in the affected paragraph, press Ctrl+L (or go to Format >
Paragraph and set the Alignment dropdown to "Left"). Does that fix the
spacing?

 

[Guest]

Jay,
thanks for your fast reply. I fixed it but I'm not sure how. I had to
correct the spelling of another word in the same paragraph. I deleted the
misspelled word and copied the new spelling from an email in outlook. When I
did that, the wide spaces between words shrank to normal size. I don't
understand why it worked but it did!

If this happens again, I'll use your suggestion below and try deleting a
word and replacing it.