Word 2003, 2007, 2010: Control hyphenation in a targeted manner
If you want to manually exclude individual words or paragraphs from hyphenation in Word, you have to use a few tricks. We'll give them away.
Enable hyphenation in Word
With a few tricks, you can control the hyphenation so that it is either fully automatic or manual or is switched off for individual paragraphs or even just individual words. However, the necessary settings for this are distributed in Word.
- First, activate hyphenation. To do this, switch to the "Page layout" tab in the ribbon and click on "Hyphenation" in the "Page setup" area. Here you can quickly change the default to "Automatic" or "Manual".
- For detailed settings, choose the "Hyphenation Options". In Word 2003 open the command »Tools | Language | Hyphenation options ". Then activate the "Automatic hyphenation". In addition, change the default for "Successive hyphens" to "3", so that there is no hyphenation on every line and the legibility deteriorates. Activate the automatic with »OK«.
- Shorter texts can also be done manually, which is not a good choice for extensive texts in terms of effort and error susceptibility.
Exclude paragraphs from hyphenation
This setting always applies to the entire document, so that you cannot exclude individual words here. An exception to the formatting, however, enables the active automatic hyphenation to be switched off in batches.
- To do this, right-click in the relevant paragraph and select the context command »Paragraph«.
- Activate the »Line and page break« tab.
- For the "formatting exceptions", activate the "No hyphenation" option and confirm with "OK".
Make individual words inseparable
Often this does not yet give the desired result because it also switches off the necessary hyphenation. It is better to exclude only single words from hyphenation, which can be done with a trick.
- Since the hyphenation is based on the entries in the dictionary, deactivate the spelling checker for the word in question.
- To do this, first select the word and switch to the »Check« tab in the ribbon. There, click on "Language" and then on "Set language for proofing tools". Activate the "Do not check spelling and grammar" option and confirm with "OK".
- Repeat the step for all words with unwanted hyphenation. This way you can avoid irritating separations such as Volta | ire, As | sisi or Asparagus | der. The best way to cook asparagus is with our home tip.
