MS Word —

Insert a "Hard Space"

My recently departed, late-lamented, and highly dedicated word processor let you insert a "hard space" that kept the words around it together, so if you wrote "Jose[hard space]Public," "Jose" and "Public" wouldn't be split at the end of a line if that was where the phrase happened to fall. Word doesn't offer hard spaces, even though it's a basic feature.

Word does offer this feature, but it calls them "nonbreaking" spaces. To type a nonbreaking space, press Ctrl+Shift+Spacebar. If the key combination slips your mind, choose Insert » Symbol, click the Special Characters tab, and look for the "Nonbreaking Space" item.

Word also offers nonbreaking hyphens, which you can insert by pressing Ctrl+_ (that's Ctrl and the underscore key).

Nonbreaking spaces appear as normal spaces unless you display all punctuation marks (click the Show/Hide button on the Standard toolbar) or display spaces (choose Tools » Options, click the View tab, and check the Spaces box). Spaces then appear as dots, and nonbreaking spaces appear as degree symbols (see Figure 3-9).

Figure 3-9. Use nonbreaking or "hard" spaces to keep words together. Nonbreaking spaces appear as degree symbols when you have spaces displayed.