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Microsoft Word Decrees All High-School IT Teachers Were Wrong: Double Spaces Now Flagged as Typos

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday April 28 2020, @01:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the and-then-they-discovered-  dept.

martyb writes:

Microsoft decrees that all high-school IT teachers were wrong: Double spaces now flagged as typos in Word:

One space good, two spaces bad? (This story appears near the end of the article; scroll down to see it.)

Finally, Microsoft found time to weigh in on the age-old debate of just how many spaces belong after a full stop (or "period"). Thanks to an update, Word will apparently treat two spaces as a typo and festoon a double-spaced document with red, squiggly lines unless told to ignore the rule.

A debate for the ages finally settled. Where do you stand? ⚔️ https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1253655739379470338

— Microsoft 365 (@Microsoft365) April 24, 2020

Not everyone is impressed with change; this hack, for example, has fond memories of bashing away on the keys of a typewriter back in the day and slapping the spacebar twice between sentences [...]. It has proven a hard habit to break. Others, such as Jason Howard, senior project manager on the Windows Insider Team, called for a poll on the matter.

@Microsoft365 has thrown down the gauntlet. Apparently #MicrosoftWord will now flag double-spacing between sentences as an error.

Which side will you pick? Choose wisely...

— Jason Howard (@NorthFaceHiker) April 24, 2020

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Tuesday April 28 2020, @02:57PM (3 children)

    by Pslytely Psycho (1218) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @02:57PM (#987837)

    And yet, you only single-spaced this comment....really ingrained habit you have there..

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  • (Score: 2) by Nuke on Tuesday April 28 2020, @05:55PM (2 children)

    by Nuke (3162) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @05:55PM (#987932)

    HTML renders all white space as single-space. HTML did it years ahead of Microsoft.

    • (Score: 1) by DECbot on Tuesday April 28 2020, @07:29PM

      by DECbot (832) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @07:29PM (#987969) Journal

      If they really cared, they would use the &nbsp; to make the HTML respect the damned whitespace.  <--Like this!

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    • (Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Tuesday April 28 2020, @10:07PM

      by Pslytely Psycho (1218) on Tuesday April 28 2020, @10:07PM (#988021)

      Fascinating.
      I guess I never noticed because as an adult I have always used a single space.

      I do vaguely recall a high school typing class that stressed two spaces in business correspondence. And a college medical transcription course that pushed single spacing to speed up transcription on the old Selectric ball typewriters, one less keystroke per sentence. I sucked at that course, as typing words like laperohysterosalpingo-oophorectomy always slowed me down considerably. I passed, but barely.

      I kept to single spacing after that.

      The more you know (the more you can fuck things up!!)

      (;

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