More often than not we all get MS-Word files in which a lot of lines either begin with unnecessary spaces or they have lots of trailing spaces –and if it is a really bad case –lines will have both leading and trailing spaces. Not-so-tech-savvy people use leading spaces to align lines (this is why you should subscriber my blog and keep on learning useful MS Word tips) MS-Word does not provide any straightforward method to remove such unwanted spaces. Therefore, most people remove them manually by repeated pressing backspace or delete keys. But there is a smarter way to handle this situation! Here it is:

Select lines with leading and/or trailing spaces Press Ctrl + E to center align these lines Keeping the lines selected, press Ctrl + R to do right align. This will remove trailing spaces Keeping the lines selected, press Ctrl + L to do left align. This will remove leading spaces

And you are done! Now your MS Word document will be devoid of those extra leading and trialing space. Only neat and clean sentences will remain. After this problem, I usually encounter the arbitrary paragraph or line breaks. Here you can learn how to remove such line and paragraph break too. If you have a file with .txt and .rtf extensions having extra spaces -you can always open these with MS-Word and apply the same method to do away with spaces. Please let me know if you have any questions about this method. I will be happy to try and help you. Thank you for using TechWelkin. Words fail to express with so much relief in my office now. Regards Tirupati Dutta Selecting all the cells the CTRL-E, CTRL-R, CTRL-L doesn’t work… waaah! A method that does work if the text is in a table is to use “Convert to Text” (Table / Layout tab in Word 2016) and then “Convert Text To Table” … bingo, leading spaces are gone! To remove leading spaces and tabs the ‘Find what’ and ‘Replace with’ strings are: ^13[!^13][^9^32]{1,}*([^33-^126]) ^p\1 Note: you must turn on the ‘Use wildcards’ option for this to work. To remove trailing spaces and tabs the strings are: [^9^32]{1,}^13 ^p Comment * Name * Email * Website

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Remove Extra Leading and Trailing Spaces in MS Word - 2