Word 2007 shrinking tabs to squeeze extra character on a line. How to disable this function?

Hello,

After six hours of my futile amateur attempts, it's clear I need a pro.

Occasionally in Word 2007, the text I type will be near the maximum the line can hold, and when I type the next character Word will try to squeeze it onto the line by shrinking my left tab. This results in uneven paragraph indents, which looks very sloppy.

If anyone knows a way to make Word just start a new line when the maximum line length is reached, and turn off this "smash the tabs to make it fit" function, I would be very, very grateful for that information.

For reference, if you copy the following four lines into Word 2007, in Courier New, 12 pt, with default tab stops of 0.4", you will see that the second and fourth lines have this shrunken tab problem.

     Johanna shuffled over to where Hunter had moved several...

    Hunter climbed into the Reaper and spoke over their commlink.

     Be safe.  

    Johannas heavy heart lifted slightly. Could this be the one?

Thank you,

Tom

March 11th, 2015 2:30pm

Could you share an example document that illustrates the problem? Upload the example, in Word format, to OneDrive or Dropbox and post a link here.

Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
March 11th, 2015 6:59pm

Hi Stefan, thank you for replying, and sorry for the delay.

Here is an example. https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=F3BF58EFEC14E64B!127&authkey=!ABhtu2udead5u-0&ithint=file%2cdocx

It appears that OneDrive does not show this problem unless you select "edit document" then "edit in word". I have Word 07, and in there it causes the sloppy-looking, different indent sizes I am trying to fix.

Thank you for any insights you may be able to share.

Tom

April 9th, 2015 12:32pm

A quick fix is to select all the text and add a custom tab stop (by clicking the ruler) at the position where you want it.

I am not sure about the underlying cause for the problem, but I suspect that it's language-related. When I look in the Reveal Formatting task pane, language is shown as "(Asian) Chinese (PRC)" and "(Other) English (United States)."

Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
April 9th, 2015 1:51pm

Stefan,

You were right! I turned off Chinese through Microsoft Language Settings and in new documents the problem is gone. This is wonderful!

However, I notice that the problem is still there in documents that I've already created,  and I can't figure out how to get it to stop showing the language as "(Asian) Chinese (PRC)" in these already-existing documents. Any ideas?

Thank you so much for your help. Things are looking better!

Tom

April 9th, 2015 4:09pm

Unfortunately, I have no experience with Asian language settings. I think you will have to make do with the workaround of adding a custom tab stop, unless someone else knows the answer of course.
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
April 9th, 2015 5:59pm

Thanks for all the help, Stefan. At least now all new docs will look clean.
April 9th, 2015 7:05pm

Thanks for the follow-up.
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
April 10th, 2015 4:45am

This topic is archived. No further replies will be accepted.

Other recent topics Other recent topics