PowerPoint adds odd linebreaks, breaks lines in odd places or in the middle of words

Problem

You have some text. For example:

apples, peaches, pears, lions, tigers, bears, oh, my

With word-wrap turned on, it should look like this:

apples, peaches, pears,
lions, tigers, bears, oh, my

but instead it looks like

apples, peaches, pe
ars, lions, tigers, be
ars, oh, my

or

apples, peaches
, pears, lions, tig
ers, bears, oh,
my

or

apples, peaches, pears, lions, tiger
s, bears, oh, my

depending on how you resize the textbox.

Any word at the end of a line will break after the character closest to the margin, and wrap to the next line without a hyphen.

Solution

Try enabling Japanese and changing the option to allow a break. Here's how:

In PowerPoint 2003 and previous:

• Go to Start | Programs | Office | Microsoft Office Tools | Microsoft Office 2003 Language Settings.
• Choose Japanese and add it to "enabled languages."
• Then start PowerPoint, open your file, and choose the text box in question.
• Go to Format | Line Spacing, and there should be another option -- Line Break.
• Remove the checkmark next to "Allow Latin text to wrap in the middle of a word."

In PowerPoint 2007:

• Go to Start | Programs | Office | Microsoft Office Tools | Microsoft Office 2007 Language Settings.
• Choose Japanese and add it to "enabled languages."
• Then start PowerPoint, open your file, and choose the text box in question.
• Go to Home | Paragraph | click the icon in the lower right corner of the Paragraph group to open the Paragraph formatting dialog box.
• Go to the Asian Typography tab of the Paragraph dialog box.
• Remove the checkmark next to "Allow Latin text to wrap in the middle of a word."

Background

What's probably happened is that your PowerPoint file was created or edited on a Japanese system and this text box's language was set as Japanese; as a result, it's now obeying the Japanese language rules for word/line breaks instead of English rules. The rulebooks are very different and don't mix well.

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