Nothing makes a document look less professional than "£" stranded at the end of one line and "500" at the start of the next. Non-breaking spaces are the detail that makes reports, proposals and CVs look polished, and most people have never heard of them.
Step by step
- Place the cursor where the space should go, for example between "10" and "kg", or delete the ordinary space that's already there.
- Press Ctrl+Shift+Spacebar.
- The two words now always stay together, wherever the line wraps.
Tips & troubleshooting
- Use them in amounts and units (10 kg), names (Mr Smith), dates (1 January) and product names (Windows 11).
- Press Ctrl+Shift+8 to show formatting marks. A non-breaking space appears as a small degree sign (°) instead of a dot.
- Ctrl+Shift+Hyphen inserts a non-breaking hyphen, which does the same job for hyphenated words and phone numbers.
Where non-breaking spaces belong
- Numbers and their units: 10 kg, 25 °C, 50 mph, 3 pm.
- Currency written out: £5 million, 20 per cent.
- Titles and names: Mr Smith, Dr Patel, Henry VIII.
- Dates: 9 October, so the day never sits alone at the end of a line.
- References: page 12, Figure 3, Section 4.2.
- Phone numbers and reference codes with spaces in them.
Other ways to insert one
- Insert tab: choose Symbol, More Symbols, open the Special Characters tab and pick Nonbreaking Space.
- Number pad: hold Alt and type 0160.
- AutoCorrect: if you often type the same pair, such as a company name, add it as an AutoCorrect entry that includes the non-breaking space.
Fix a whole document with Find and Replace
Word uses the code ^s for a non-breaking space. To protect every figure followed by kg, press Ctrl+H, type a space followed by kg in Find what, and ^skg in Replace with, then choose Replace All. Searching for ^s alone finds the ones already in a document, which is useful when text pasted from the web is full of them and lines are breaking strangely.
Related characters
A non-breaking hyphen, Ctrl+Shift+Hyphen, keeps hyphenated words and number ranges on one line. For keeping whole lines or headings together across pages, use the Keep with next and Keep lines together settings in the Paragraph dialog instead.
In Word for Mac the non-breaking space is Option+Spacebar. Ctrl+Shift+Spacebar also works in Outlook and PowerPoint on Windows.