text moving left and right

[Mark G]

I am using Word 2000. I am working with files from another
user who is writing chapters using a template I developed.
His text behaves differenly than mine, though, and I can't
figure out why. When I click into any paragraph in his
doc (no matter what style the paragraph is), and start
typing, the line goes through instantaneous word and
character spacing adjustments BOTH to left and to right,
until (if I keep typing) eventually the line gets too
long, and the farthest-right word flops down to the next
line. In other words, it's acting like it's trying to
justify every line or something. It's driving me
batty...I'm accustomed to the characters moving ONLY to
the right when I'm inserting stuff. Justification is OFF
and hyphenation settings don't seem to make any
difference. Is there some global setting I'm not seeing?

Thanks very much for any help,
Mark

 

[Bob S]

I am using Word 2000. I am working with files from another
user who is writing chapters using a template I developed.
His text behaves differenly than mine, though, and I can't
figure out why. When I click into any paragraph in his
doc (no matter what style the paragraph is), and start
typing, the line goes through instantaneous word and
character spacing adjustments BOTH to left and to right,
until (if I keep typing) eventually the line gets too
long, and the farthest-right word flops down to the next
line. In other words, it's acting like it's trying to
justify every line or something. It's driving me
batty...I'm accustomed to the characters moving ONLY to
the right when I'm inserting stuff. Justification is OFF
and hyphenation settings don't seem to make any
difference. Is there some global setting I'm not seeing?

Thanks very much for any help,
Mark

This sounds as though the "Distribute Paragraph" command has been
applied to all of his text. This would be a rather strange thing to
do, so perhaps he is a practical joker, or perhaps there is some bit
of document corruption that has occurred which has turned on this
setting inadvertently.

Try selecting one of the paragraphs and doing CTRL+Q; see if the
problem goes away for that paragraph.

Better yet, use "What's This?" and see whether it reports the
paragraph alignment as "distributed".

Bob S