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How to remove extra spaces between words in Word

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Extra spaces between words in a Word document can make your text look untidy and unprofessional. These unnecessary spaces can often occur due to formatting issues or when copying text from other sources. Fortunately, Microsoft Word provides simple ways to remove these extra spaces and clean up your document.

In this tutorial, we will show you two effective methods to remove extra spaces between words at once in Word:

 

Remove extra spaces between words with Find and Replace function

Method 1: To eliminate extra spaces between words using the Find and Replace function, follow these steps:

  1. Press Ctrl + H to open the Find and Replace dialog.
  2. In the "Find what" field, press the Space bar twice. In the "Replace with" field, press the Space bar once.
  3. Click "Replace All".
    Find and Replace dialog with two spaces in the Find what field and one space in the Replace with field
  4. Repeat step 3 until the message "All done. We made 0 replacements." appears.
    All done. We made 0 replacements dialog

Method 2: If you're familiar with regular expressions, you can use a wildcard pattern to remove all extra spaces between words at once:

  1. Press Ctrl + H to open the Find and Replace dialog.
  2. In the "Find what" field, type "( ){2,}". In the "Replace with" field, type "\1".
  3. Click the "More" button, then check the "Use wildcards" option.
  4. Click "Replace All" to remove all extra spaces at once.
    Find and Replace dialog with ( ){2,} in the Find what field and \1 in the Replace with field

Note: "( ){2,}" is a regular expression pattern that matches two or more spaces. "\1" tells Word to replace them with a single space.

Remove extra spaces between words with Kutools for Word

Kutools for Word's "Extra Spaces" utility can quickly and easily remove all extra spaces from your document.

Kutools for Word, equipped with AI 🤖, offers over 100 handy features to simplify your tasks.
  1. After installing Kutools for Word, go to the "Kutools" tab and click "Remove" > "Remove All Extra Spaces in Selected Range".
    Remove Extra Spaces option on the ribbon
  2. In the pop-up dialog that says "Do you want to remove all extra spaces?", click "Yes".
    Confirmation dialog

Now, all extra spaces between words are removed. See the before and after screenshots below:

All extra spaces are removed from the document
Tips:
  • If you want to remove extra spaces from a specific section in your document, select that section first, then click "Remove" > "Remove All Extra Spaces in Selected Range".
  • To learn more about this feature, visit the Remove Extra Spaces page.

If you want to remove spaces in Excel cells, you can use Kutools for Excel's "Remove Spaces" function to do it quickly.

Quickly remove extra/leading/trailing spaces in Excel sheet

With the Remove Spaces utility of Kutools for Excel, you can easily clean up text strings by removing spaces in various ways, including leading spaces (spaces before the text), trailing spaces (spaces after the text), both leading and trailing spaces, extra spaces between words, or all spaces from the text string entirely.

Kutools' Remove Spaces interface and use case example

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