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Welcome back to the podcast…
This week’s episode: “What’s in a name?” OR “Not Breaking Up is Hard To Do.”
You know, using hyphens can be a real pain, but more so if you’re dealing with names in Microsoft Word.
What set me off thinking about this was an article I had read about one woman’s woes after hyphenating her last name in marriage. It sounds like a common enough situation; but in the article, she describes her exasperation as dry cleaning clerks, doctor’s office receptionists, and film developers fail to grasp that her full last name is Chance-Rainwater. She winds up having to offer some guidance when they try to locate her prescription under R instead of C, and correcting them when they refer to her as simply “Mrs. Rainwater.” You can read the full story here.
I have to wonder if Rebecca Romijn-Stamos ever encountered similar tribulations during her marriage to John Stamos. It seems as though we have no trouble getting celebrities’ last names correct, even when they contain hyphens. Luckily for her (and maybe also for her career), Ms. Romijn and Mr. Stamos have since divorced and she has reverted to using only her maiden name. Maybe the constant gigging of Jesse and the Rippers was simply too much for their marriage to endure?
As much trouble as we may have when it comes to hyphenated names, the trouble is even greater when working with those names in Microsoft Word. Maybe you’ve stumbled upon this conundrum while typing in a document: if a hyphenated word falls at the end of a line, that word will often get split at the hyphen and the rest will get moved to a new line. This can be understandably vexing; if that was your last name, I’m sure you wouldn’t want it to be split up like that. If you happen to be a fan of The Simpsons, you’ll surely realize what a terrible situation this would be for Selma Bouvier-Terwilliger-Hutz-McClure-Stu-Simpson. But maybe a multi-hyphenated name isn’t really her biggest problem anyway.
Another, possibly worse situation would be having a phone number in a document that gets split onto two lines at a hyphen. As you can imagine, this is not the ideal method for displaying such data. Word doesn’t know any better, of course; it thinks it’s doing you a favor by using that document space efficiently. And naturally, Word is equally oblivious when it comes to spaces. But you may have a group of words separated by spaces that you want to keep together on the same line, such as a company name or even your own name.
Shouldn’t any break-up be mutual? Ideally, yes, but rarely does this happen to be the case. So how do we tell Word nicely that we don’t appreciate it breaking up our text without our permission?
Luckily there are special characters called nonbreaking spaces and nonbreaking hyphens that you can insert between words to prevent them from being separated when they fall at the end of a line in a document. When it encounters a nonbreaking hyphen instead of a standard hyphen, Word knows to move all of Chance-Rainwater to a new line if there is not enough space, instead of keeping Chance- at the end of one line and moving Rainwater to the next. The same goes for nonbreaking spaces; they can be used in the place of regular spaces any time you want to ensure that a group of words does not get split up onto multiple lines.
The tips in this week’s blog entry will show you how to insert these special characters:
- Let’s Stay Together – Using Nonbreaking Spaces
- Break Up Your Way – Using Nonbreaking Hyphens
- Whose Line is It, Anyway? – Using Optional Hyphens
- Bridging the Gaps – Using Word’s Hyphenation Options
Well, that’s all for this week’s edition. Hopefully you’ve come to the conclusion that when it comes to Microsoft Word, not breaking up really isn’t that hard to do, after all.
If you find these tips useful, be sure to leave us a comment at www.productiveupodcast.com, visit us on Twitter @productiveUcast, or write a review of our podcast on iTunes.
See you next time!
Music courtesy of Clayton & Fulcrum.
