PowerPoint adds space before apostrophe

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This usually happens in the French version of PowerPoint, but may happen in others.

When you type an apostrophe, PowerPoint automatically adds a space before it.

For example, you type "I'm annoyed" and PowerPoint turns it into "I 'm annoyed"
And so you are. To fix it:

• Choose Tools, Options from the menu bar
• Click the Edit tab of the Options dialog box
• Make sure there's no checkmark next to Replace straight quotes with smart quotes

And this just in from Kathy Huntzinger, who came up with this solution in the first place, and now works in our "More than you ever wanted to know" Department:

In French grammar there are spaces before and/or after punctuation marks, depending on how many "elements" make up the punctuation mark, roughly: before AND after for 2-element characters (; : " «) space before OR after (but not both) for 1-element characters (' , .).

With smart quotes turned on, you will get the space after the single quote/apostrophe and "quote" will become « quote »

The problem occurs because the single quote/apostrophe has another (much more common) function, namely elision. Instead of saying, for example, le amour, you would say l'amour. No space, since in this case the ' is an elision, not a punctuation mark.

Clear as mud?? now, whether the same behavior occurs in winme, win2000, etc. I haven't got a clue, but turning off smart quotes SHOULD fix the problem.

An alternative, like for any autoformat, is to ctrl-z immediately after Powerpoint (word, etc) does its thing, in this case inserts the space.

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