Word: Stop hyphens breaking over a line

I know. That sounds silly. Surely one of the uses of a hyphen is to break a word at the end of a line.

But sometimes you have a hyphen in a term that you DON’T want to break at the end of a line. For example, in some of the docs I’ve been working on, there are hyphenated license and permit numbers, such as W2345-98-P67. I want this string of numbers to stay together no matter what and I don’t want them to break if they hit the end of a line.

I’d never checked if I could do that, and had put up with the occasional instance of such a number splitting. Then a few days ago, a tip from Jeanne M Perdue’s Technical Writing Tips from the Oil Patch blog came into my Inbox — and there was the solution!

To insert a non breaking hyphen, hold down Ctrl+Shift as you press the hyphen key.

That’s it. With Ctrl+Shift+- a non breaking hyphen is inserted (it looks a little like a cross between a hyphen and an en dash) and all parts of your term will stay together.

Thanks Jeanne!

See also:

• Jeanne’s original post: http://oilpatchwriting.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/nonbreaking-hyphens/
• Non breaking spaces the easy way: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2008/12/29/word-nonbreaking-spaces-the-easy-way/

[Links last checked October 2010]