Words Run Together in Word 2007 (Missing Spaces) — Fix
I was asked to help with a funny glitch: when a document is opened in Office 2007, its words run together — the spaces disappear. Yet on another PC with Microsoft Office 2010 the same document opens fine, and other documents look normal in Office 2007.
In short: installing the Office 2007 service packs — SP2 and SP3 — fixed it for me. Below is what I tried and what else to check if the updates are already installed.
What I did
- Found and deleted the
Normal.dotmdocument template — Office recreates it at startup. Didn’t help. - Downloaded and installed the Office 2007 service packs: Service Pack 2 (
office2007sp2-kb953195-fullfile) and Service Pack 3 (office2007sp3-kb2526086-fullfile). That helped — the file displayed correctly.
The document was possibly created in a newer version of Word, and Office 2007 without updates rendered its layout incorrectly.
If the updates are installed and words still run together
- Check the fonts. If the document uses a font that isn’t installed, Word substitutes another one — and the spacing can go wrong. In Word 2007: Office button → Word Options → Advanced → under “Show document content”, the Font Substitution button. It shows which fonts are missing; install them or map them to ones you have.
- Install all Office 2007 updates from Windows Update, not just the service packs.
- Ask for the document in another format — for example, saved as .doc (Word 97–2003), or as a PDF if you only need to read it.
P.S. It really is worth updating your programs now and then. I usually choose “Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them” — and review and install what I need from time to time.