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What is Word's non-printing symbol that is a small circle (looks like a "degrees" mark)? I haven't found this in other articles, web searches, forums. Is it a new version of "keep with next"?

This comes up regularly when copy/pasting from a gmail draft into Word for the purpose of fixing formatting (gmail often scrambles my formatting even if it looks right before I hit send).

These are helpful but still don't contain the mark I'm looking for: http://wordfaqs.mvps.org/NonprintChars.htm http://wordribbon.tips.net/T005994_Understanding_Nonprinting_Characters.html What does this nonprinting symbol mean in Microsoft Word?

Here's how it looks like :

enter image description here

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    Screenshot please. Upload your image(s) to Imgur and you will get link(s) you can share. Edit your question to include the link(s) and someone with sufficient reputation will inline the image(s) for you.
    – DavidPostill
    Apr 19, 2016 at 17:41

2 Answers 2

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What is the nonprinting symbol that is a small circle (looks like a "degrees" mark)?

It's a non-breaking space.


Space Characters

A degree symbol ° represents a non-breaking space (Ctrl+Shift+Space), which you can use to prevent words from being separated at the end of a line.

Source Nonprinting Formatting Marks

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With newer versions of MS Word, and other Office tools, there is a new feature that looks just like a degree mark that appears under the cursor. Searching for what this may be provides this question as a possible answer, especially since it also appears when using copying and pasting or other document repositioning.

There is a feature that is related to MS Word's touch features.

It will appear if you scroll the screen around, and pause for a moment, or if you touch the screen to position the cursor, or to select a section of text.

To use this feature, start off by tapping the screen once to position the cursor at that location. You can then move the cursor by dragging the circle to another location. If you want to select text, double click on text and it will select that word, then you can drag the starting position or the ending position.

You cannot select it with the mouse, but if you have a touch screen, you can use touch to reposition the selections.

Word's touch feature when positioning the cursor

Word's touch feature when selecting multiple characters

More information About the Word's Touch features

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    – Community Bot
    Sep 30, 2022 at 22:47

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