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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @09:09PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @09:09PM (#987998)

    > just like we no longer teach people to dial "1" before a "long distance" number.

    OT, but I'm still in an area where we do have to dial "1" to get outside our area code. Over the years this has been very perplexing to international visitors to the USA--since numbers are often written without the "1".

  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday April 30 2020, @12:57AM (1 child)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday April 30 2020, @12:57AM (#988375)

    Do you still have a landline? AFAIK, landlines are still like this. "We" don't teach people to dial "1" any more because almost no one has landlines any more, and cellphones don't use the "1" (unless you're dialing a US number from outside the states, in which case you need to dial "+1", not just "1"). I don't know anyone who has a landline any more. Even my elderly mother who lives in a small town doesn't have a landline.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @03:37AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @03:37AM (#988419)

      Yes, land line, still copper, works during power outages (we have big snow and ice storms...). But Verizon is stringing fiber in the neighborhood this month and soon we will have to convert to something else--FiOS or cable phone.

      Cell phone doesn't work well here, we're between towers or something. Business calls are frequent for me and I don't have time for "Can you hear me now?" crap from expensive cell phone toys.