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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

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @10:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @10:06PM (#988019)

    The junior high school I went to, many moons ago, was very old and only had a small gym with a single locker room. So the girls got to use the gym in the junior high building, and the boys had to go across the large parking lot to the high school to have gym. With the high school boys.

    Imagine, if you will, being a seventh grader nerd for whom puberty was merely a rumor, having to take gym class with high schoolers. Especially the seniors, when for senior year gym wasn't mandatory so all the seniors were there voluntarily. Not just the sports, which was bad enough, but having to shower with everyone. It was not good. During the first week, in the shower the oldest boys started to (ahem) hassle us junior highers, until the coach stuck his head into the shower and stopped it. The rest of the year, and following ones, after class the coach stood where he could swivel his head and keep an eye on what was going on in the shower and in the rest of the locker room. We might have been the only boys ever who were glad the coach was watching us take showers.

    That was over forty years ago, and I still occasionally have a bad dream about being in that locker room again.