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.

Turning Off Paragraph Hyphenation

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated July 3, 2021)
This tip applies to Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003

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:

Make sure the insertion point is located in the paragraph you don't want to hyphenate.
Choose Paragraph from the Format menu. Word displays the Paragraph dialog box.
Make sure the Line and Page Breaks tab is selected. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The Line and Page Breaks tab of the Paragraph dialog box.

Ensure the Don't Hyphenate check box is selected.
Click on OK.

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.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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