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I currently teach college-level English, and I try to help students with layout and formatting. I have a decent knowledge of using Word, but this has me just baffled. Okay, I am using the latest version, full APP (not browser), and Windows.
Long story short, a small section of text will not let me start a new paragraph, which means I can press "enter" all I want with nothing happening. The same goes for using "ctrl + enter" for a page break. However, "shift + enter" will give me a line break. It seems like I can do everything else like highlight, space, change the font (style, size), delete, backspace, etc. Here's a screenshot below the of the area that is confusing me:
But, wait. There's more. When I put my cursor at the start and end of this little section, I have to press the arrow key twice to get to the next character. Example, with the cursor by the "M" of Michael, I press the right arrow once with nothing happening and then again to move it in between the "M" and "i". It's the same thing with the "A" of "Although".
I am not seeing anything different between this little section and the rest of the document when examining settings: show paragraph markings, display hidden text, reveal formatting.
The only real clue that I can think of is that the font color changes: black to start with the title then gray all the way to the end until a last section where it switches back to black. This does hint at being copy / pasted from a different source and mixed formatting but cannot be certain.
Thanks in advance for any insights.
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Thanks for the update.
A content control may have been "inherited" from the document template or inserted as part of an AutoText (Building Block).
To get rid of all content controls in one step, you can save the document to the older *.doc format and then save it back to *.docx.
What do you see if you press ALT+F9
If this happens in a particular document, that document might be damaged. If you want to, you can share it, or a representative sample, with the forum.
If you are typing in a Plain Text Content Control, it may have the property unchecked to not allow use of the Enter key or multiple paragraphs. That is the default setting.
If you click in one and check the properties under the Developer tab, if this is the case, you can change it so that it can accept multiple paragraphs. However, it will insert a line break rather than a paragraph break. Only Rich Text controls allow real paragraph breaks and different paragraph formatting.
Update....
Thanks, Stefan Blom and Doug Robbins - MVP Office Apps & Services (Word), for the tips here. No answers found when viewing field codes, but I did find an answer (at least partially). The section in question has content control enabled, so now I am wondering how or why just this section.
Of course, the more logical answer to all of this is that I work with a lot of students and have explored so many documents with really weird formatting / layout choices or settings. The document is also using a few different styles: contact info for a heading on the first page (odd choice or accident), title for the essay title (makes sense), and normal for everything else (also makes sense).
I learn about more and more about Word every semester.