Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Word 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Word, click here: Turning Off Paragraph Hyphenation.
The hyphenation tool provided with Word can be very handy when creating a document. There may be some paragraphs, however, in which you don't want Word to hyphenate words. You can turn off hyphenation for selected paragraphs by following these steps:
Figure 1. The Line and Page Breaks tab of the Paragraph dialog box.
Now, when you choose to do an automatic hyphenation, all the paragraphs formatted for no hyphenation are skipped, and only those paragraphs that are not formatted that way are hyphenated. If you use styles, of course, you can make this even easier by setting up some sort of paragraph style that has the hyphenation setting turned on or off according to your needs.
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (916) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Turning Off Paragraph Hyphenation.
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2019-11-07 05:24:50
"Some paragraphs" is not enough. I need to know how to disable this annoying function throughout the whole document.
2018-01-10 02:23:43
Arezo
I have done that hyphenation many times, but still it is not working, nor it shows this symbol -. Can you please help me out with it.
2016-09-30 20:16:53
Something
This isn't helpful at all if you have the latest version of word.
2015-11-02 20:11:43
Paul
Thanks, made my morning. (Australia)
2015-04-17 09:07:53
Coffee
What if I have a word that is hyphenated, but I do not want that word to start a new line and break up the word if it's at the end of a line. E.g. the name Toulouse-Lautrec will be split up into two parts, but I want it to stay together.
2013-12-17 13:31:40
ansdell
Hi,
I don't ever want to have hyphennation - I want it permanently disabled.
What you are saying in this article is how to temporarily disable it for the particular document I am working on.
How many hours thi problem has forced me to waste over these past decade and more,, having to reset the Hyphenation to "None" or "Never" each time I want to create and save a text document.
I continue to search for an answer. Very tiresome problem!!
Kind regards
Tracy Ansdell
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Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Word 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Word, click here: 
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