Another weird thing happened this morning. No, I’m not talking about the switch to SummerTime, although I am not a big fan of changing the time twice a year, but that’s another story.
I was typing a text in Microsoft Word 2007 and noticed that whenever I typed a colon (:), magically a space was added before the colon. I was actually entering times in the document, like 9:45, but it always ended up as 9 :45, with a space before the colon.
It drove me crazy. Why did Word do that? I could not find anything about this in the AutoCorrect settings (which I had trouble to find in Word 2007 by the way, it’s in Word Options > Proofing).
Finally, after quite some Googleling, I learned from this blog that in French, punctuation rules state that you always need a non-breaking space before a colon. And yes, somehow Word was thinking that I was entering French text, when I checked the Language settings:
When switching to English, the space was not added automatically before the colon.
I was interested in finding out whether you can turn that off, even when writing French. The same blog explained it: the option is linked to AutoCorrect > AutoFormat As You Type > Replace “Straight quotes” with “smart quotes”. As the blog states: “It doesn’t just replace straight quotes with smart quotes. It actually uses the appropriate quotation marks for each language, and adds the required non-breaking spaces before and after the punctuation marks based on that language’s typographic rules.”
Interesting. And undocumented, as far as I know :-S
Hello,the complexities of windows as you have illustrated are indeed wondrous.Well done for sorting out that gremlin,I think I would have been lost…Tom Australia.
You are amazing! Thank you so much for helping me solve this problem. I was totally stumped.
THANK YOU. Argh. Word.
you are brilliant. thanks for this!
ACE. Saved my day
Thank you for posting this helpful information. I suspect that MS Word “acquired” the settings from a document that I received from a source in France.
I do write in French, but also in English and I was trying to find a way to get rid of that automatic space before the colon. I was baffled. Thanks a lot for the info. Sometimes too much of a good thing (automatic correction) becomes a bad thing.
Thank you, I just suffered a sudden attack of the extra space before the colon and this was really useful. Problem fixed!
I just had the same thing happen and found your blog entry. My Word option for Review > Set Language showed that it thought the document was in French, and also had a check mark in the box for “Detect language automatically.” I’ve unchecked that box now, so hopefully Word won’t try to figure out the language incorrectly again.
thanks a million. i was perplexed! ..and so easily fixed.