Dear Ms. Byte,

After copying text from a web source, I pasted the text into my Word document. Now, there are a lot of extra spaces between words. I can delete the spaces manually, but there has to be a faster way to remove extra spaces between words.

Sincerely – Frustrated Fran

Dear Frustrated Fran,

I’m so glad you asked – yes! There is a faster way to remove the extra spaces between words. Following these steps will save you a bunch of time.

Sincerely – Ms. Bytes

Remove Extra Spaces Between Words

Obviously, you would like to have one space between words, right? Since you don’t want to remove all the spaces in your document, the secret will be using Word’s powerful Find & Replace feature. You are going to “Find” all of the extra spaces and “Replace” them with only 1 space.

In the steps below, step #4 indicates that you should enter 2 numbers in brackets. The first number is the minimum number of sequential spaces to find, and the second represents the maximum number of sequential spaces to find — in the example below, {3,20} is asking Word to find a minimum of three and a maximum of 20 consecutive spaces.

  1. Pressing Ctrl+H will open the Find and Replace dialog box.
  2. In the lower section, click on the More button. This will display the search options.
  3. Select the Use wildcards check box.
  4. In the Find what field, press the spacebar once followed by {3,20}.
  5. In the Replace with field, press the spacebar once.
  6. Click Replace All.

 

Remove extra spaces between words

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