If you use MS Word to write your official documents or for your writing assignments, you would want to align your paragraphs to make your document or write up look more professional. Therefore, you use the Paragraph option located under the Home tab in Word to neatly arrange your paragraphs using bullets, numbering, alignment, indent, line & spacing, shading, borders, sort, show/hide, and justify.
Using the Justify option would ensure that the spaces between the Words are adjusted, thereby, aligning the text compared to a column. All you need to do is to select the desired paragraph and click the Justify button and you are done. But what if, you are trying to Justify some paragraphs in your documentary it doesn’t work. That’s quite a common issue and hence, nothing to worry about. We have a quick fix for this issue. Let’s find out.
Preliminary Fix
If you are trying to justify a paragraph by pressing Ctrl+Shift+J keys together , then only last line of the paragraph will be justified. If you want to justify ‘normally’, press Ctrl+J together from your keyboard.
Fix 1 – How to Fix Justify Text/Paragraph Not Working Issue in MS Word Using Find Option
Step 1: Open the desired MS Word document, select the Paragraph you want to justify, then click on the Find option on the upper right corner of the document, and select Advanced Find.
You can also Press CTRL and H key directly to open Advanced find
Step 2: In the Advanced Find prompt, click on the Replace Tab. In the Find box, enter ^p and click on Replace All.
*Note – Press Shift key + the number 6 to get the ^ symbol. Also, the Replace with field should be empty.
Step 3:In the next prompt. Click on No.
Step 4: Click on the Close button.
Now, fix any space errors in the document and you are done.
Fix 2 – Using Advanced Options in MS word
1 – Make sure the file is open in MS word
2. Click on File
3. Click on Options
4. Click on Advanced from the left menu.
5. Now, Check option Don’t expand character spaces on a line that ends with SHIFT Return
Fix 3 – Copy pasting it back on Word
This trick work for most of the user although it looks silly. Just Copy all the text content of word and paste it in Notepad.
Now, Close Word and Open it again.
Again Copy all the content from Notepad and then paste it back to Microsoft word.