When you turn on automatic hyphenation, MS Word will automatically insert hyphens where they are needed in your document. If you later edit the document and change the line breaks, Word will re-hyphenate your document for you.
When you select manual hyphenation, Word searches the text to hyphenate and will ask you to confirm each proposed optional hyphen (which can be a pain) and then will insert the optional hyphens.
If you later edit your document and change the line breaks, Word will display and print only the optional hyphens that still fall at the ends of lines. It will not rehyphenate your document for you.
To insert an optional hyphen:
- Click in your document where you would like to insert an optional hyphen, which is a hyphen that is used to control where a word or phrase will break if it falls at the end of a line in your document.
- Click CTRL + hyphen to insert your optional hyphen.
To insert a Non-breaking Hyphen:
- Click in your document where you would like to insert a non-breaking hyphen, which is a hyphen that is used to prevent a hyphenated word, number or phrase from breaking if it falls at the end of a line. One example would be a telephone number.
- Click CTRL + Shift + Hyphen to insert your non-breaking hyphen.