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Word 16 Opening Quotes Backward

Anonymous
2017-02-16T22:24:10+00:00

I'm using Microsoft Word 16 on an HP computer I bought last October.

Recently, I've encountered an issue where my smart quotes aren't working correctly in review comments—every time I type a quotation mark, it creates a closing quotation, like this:

I've tried turning the quotes to straight quotes and back, and that hasn't fixed the problem. The smart quotes appear to be working fine when I'm typing directly into the body of a document, but any time I leave a comment this issue occurs. This is very important to me, because I am an editor and I use the comment feature very frequently; because I'm being paid to fix errors, my punctuation has to be perfect too! Any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated.

Also, I know I can use the alt code 0147, but I feel this is only a very temporary solution and quite frustrating. Thanks!

Microsoft Word: 2016 MSO (16.0.7571.7095) 32-bit

Office: Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus

Windows: Windows 10 Home, version 1607

Computer: HP Laptop, 64-bit operating system, x64-based Intel Core i5 processor, 2016

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. Stefan Blom 338.5K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2017-02-16T22:56:39+00:00

    The appearance of smart quotes is language-dependent. Select just the opening quote and click Review | Language | Set Proofing Language and see which language Word thinks that you are using. While you have the Language dialog box open, be sure to clear "Detect language automatically" which would prevent Word from trying to guess the language at the insertion point.

    For an existing document where the language is incorrect, you often have to select all the text and manually change the language for the selection. Go to the Language dialog box (as discussed above) and choose the language, and then click OK (do not click Set As Default).

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