Remove Pesky Double Spaces Between Sentences In Microsoft Word
**Hey, it’s Chris here! The following is a guest post by a fellow VBA blogger named Ryan Wells who has some great macro code posted to his website. I want to give a special thanks to Ryan for taking the time to share with the TSG community and provide us with some awesome code. Take it away Ryan!
What This VBA Code Does
To some, nothing makes their blood boil quite like two spaces after a period. People are passionate about their character spacing. I’ve witnessed some pretty heated arguments about whether you should have one space or two spaces following a punctuation mark.
I admit, I once was a longtime member of the “two-spaces-after-a-period” camp, but my Public Relations wife pointed out how horribly wrong I was. Truth is, the practice of adding two spaces after a period dates back to the days of 1950s-era monospaced manual typewriters. In today’s world of proportional fonts, a single space is preferred.
This VBA macro replaces all those annoying double spaces in your Word document with single spaces and lets you know how many replacements the macro made.
Sub ReplaceDoubleSpaces()
'PURPOSE: Replace all double spaces in the active document with single
' spaces and report the number of instances replaced.
'SOURCE: www.TheSpreadsheetGuru.com/the-code-vault
'AUTHOR: Ryan Wells (wellsr.com)
Dim Org_Count As Double
Dim New_Count As Double
Dim Replacements As Double
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
'Count the original number of characters (for report out)
Org_Count = ActiveDocument.Characters.Count
'Find/Replace double spaces with single spaces
With Selection.Find
.ClearFormatting
.Replacement.ClearFormatting
.Text = Space(2)
.Replacement.Text = Space(1)
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
.Format = False
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = True
.MatchWildcards = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End With
'Count the final number of characters
New_Count = ActiveDocument.Characters.Count
'Calculate number of replacements
Replacements = Org_Count - New_Count
'Report results
If Replacements = 0 Then
MsgBox "No double spaces found in document.", _
vbInformation, "Replace Double Space"
Else
MsgBox "Replacing " & Replacements & " double space(s) with single space(s).", _
vbInformation, "Replace Double Space"
End If
Application.ScreenUpdating = True
End SubAbout The Author
Ryan Wells is a nuclear engineer by day and a VBA developer by night. He set out to automate many of his complex nuclear engineering tasks using VBA with the goal of reducing errors and increasing efficiency. Ryan now publishes his VBA code examples and macro tutorials from Excel, Outlook, Word, and more to inspire other office workers to do the same with their jobs. If you like what you see, check out Ryan’s VBA Tutorials Blog .
Using VBA Code Found On The Internet
Now that you’ve found some VBA code that could potentially solve your Excel automation problem, what do you do with it? If you don’t necessarily want to learn how to code VBA and are just looking for the fastest way to implement this code into your spreadsheet, I wrote an article (with video) that explains how to get the VBA code you’ve found running on your spreadsheet.
Getting Started Automating Excel
Are you new to VBA and not sure where to begin? Check out my quickstart guide to learning VBA. This article won’t overwhelm you with fancy coding jargon, as it provides you with a simplistic and straightforward approach to the basic things I wish I knew when trying to teach myself how to automate tasks in Excel with VBA Macros.
Also, if you haven’t checked out Excel’s latest automation feature called Power Query, I have put together a beginner’s guide for automating with Excel’s Power Query feature as well! This little-known built-in Excel feature allows you to merge and clean data automatically with little to no coding!
How Do I Modify This To Fit My Specific Needs?
Chances are this post did not give you the exact answer you were looking for. We all have different situations and it’s impossible to account for every particular need one might have. That’s why I want to share with you: My Guide to Getting the Solution to your Problems FAST! In this article, I explain the best strategies I have come up with over the years to get quick answers to complex problems in Excel, PowerPoint, VBA, you name it!
I highly recommend that you check this guide out before asking me or anyone else in the comments section to solve your specific problem. I can guarantee that 9 times out of 10, one of my strategies will get you the answer(s) you are needing faster than it will take me to get back to you with a possible solution. I try my best to help everyone out, but sometimes I don’t have time to fit everyone’s questions in (there never seem to be quite enough hours in the day!).
I wish you the best of luck and I hope this tutorial gets you heading in the right direction!
After 10+ years of creating macros and developing add-ins, I've compiled all the hacks I wish I had known years ago!
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Ryan Wells