When you press the ENTER key What does Microsoft Word insert into the document?

I'm currently working on a word document, however right now though I have this weird error where my cursor floats to the right about 2 spaces after I hit Enter instead of going to a new line.
If I type something it shows up on the next line and the cursor moves to it, so it's not completely stopping me from working, however it is quite annoying.

It does not do this for any other document, so it seems to be some sort of setting I've changed for this document.

Any ideas on how to fix this?

Screenshots of the issue

Before hitting Enter:

After hitting Enter:

After I start typing some more:

Edit: Here's some more information, in the same document there are places where the newline functions as expected by moving the cursor to the next line. There are still many places though where this weird behavior occurs though.

asked Dec 12, 2018 at 23:03

2

This happened to me too! If you click on the little paragraph icon that appears on the Home tab, it will show you all the formatting marks and symbols throughout your document. It showed me that I had inadvertently inserted a section break. I was able to delete the break (simply by putting my cursor before the break and hitting delete) and the spacing went back to normal.

answered May 6, 2020 at 17:48

I had the exact same issue. It has to do with 'page breaks'. Most likely you did the same thing I did and added a page break by going to the "Layout tab > Breaks > Next Page". For whatever reason, when you hit enter at the end of the page before the page break that you inserted, it'll bring your cursor 2 spaces to the right of your text, but when you start typing it'll appear on the next line. (There are two places where you can add a page break. This only happened to me when I used the "Layout tab" page break, not when I used the "Insert tab" page break option.)

To fix this, I had to open a new document, then copy and paste the text. Make sure not to copy and paste the parts where the page break is located. For the spot where the page break is located, I just manually re-typed the words. Not the best solution, but I couldn't figure out how to remove the page break, so I made a new document instead. Good Luck!

answered Jul 14, 2019 at 18:02

I experienced the very same issue in Word 2013, but thankfully had it resolved. I went to draft view, under the view tab, and noticed that immediately following the words being typed, was a section break. After deleting the section break, everything returned back to normal.

answered Aug 9, 2021 at 21:28

It just occurs at the end of the section you inserted. If you added an empty line at the end of this section and then added your text before this empty line, you won't have this problem. Hope this helps..

answered Sep 7, 2019 at 11:49

Simply press shift + the Enter key and everything will come back to normal

answered Apr 20, 2020 at 23:51

The best way to remove the issue is to click on the show/hide symbol, figure out where you're cursor moves to when pressing the return or enter key and then moving the section break down one. Once you've done that, move the cursor to the original place and all of the unwanted spaces will correct themselves.

answered Dec 7 at 16:29

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