Removal of the ° character before the colons:

Hello

It’s mainly a typographic rule provided by Word by automatically inserting a non-breaking space before punctuation marks ; : ! ? to avoid separating them from their word.

The non-breaking space is activated in an auto-correction option: Office Button / Options / Proofing / AutoCorrect / tab during typing / and… surprise… it’s the quotation marks option that activates or deactivates the non-breaking space.
The space is also related to the language: in French from France but not in Canadian French

When you know what this little circle corresponds to, its display shouldn’t be a bother ;-) But if you really don’t want to see them, it’s better to turn off the display of formatting marks (with ctrl + shift + 8)… at the risk of hiding the useful display of other formatting signs ;-)

Argitxu

Hello HarryDeGembloux,

The ° character that appears in front of your colon
is a non-breaking space => with a regular (breaking) space,
it can happen that this space is at the end of a line and the “:”
at the beginning of the next line.

On the printer side:
The ° character is not printed and does not cause any issues.

On the screen side:
The ° character is displayed or not in the same way as ¶

In the Home tab, Paragraph group, click on the ¶ icon
Sometimes you won't see the °; other times you will.

To search for the ° characters between ^s
The ^ is created with < Alt Gr >< 9 >

But if these ° truly bother you, you can search /
replace ^s / (normal space); but I don’t recommend
it because you risk having “:” at the beginning of lines separated,
instead of being attached to the space and the previous word that are
left on the line above!

If your problem is solved, please go to the
top of the page to click on “Mark as resolved”.

Best regards. 😊

Hello,

You likely inadvertently triggered an auto-correction:
- Office button (at the top left)
- Word options (at the bottom)
- Proofing (on the left)
- AutoCorrect options (on the right)
- in replace you enter "the colon : "
- °: should be selected and you just need to delete and close everything.
--
Always zen
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Hello, Argitxu.

Yes, I believe these details were necessary for Harry to accurately assess the responses from albkan and gbinforme...
Harry should also clarify how the presence of this ° constitutes a "concern" for him... this will likely trigger further explanations!

Very amicably.

--
Retirement is great! Especially in the Antilles... :-)
Raymond (INSA, AFPA, CF/R)

A huge thank you to you, I have managed to no longer see this °
Have a great weekend everyone and thanks again.