PowerPoint - text wrapping in the middle of words not at the space between words

Today I had a strange PowerPoint document where the text was wrapping in the middle of words rather than at the spaces between the words. Example below

There seems to be no way to fix this within Microsoft® PowerPoint® for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2602 Build 16.0.19725.20058) 64-bit [the latest version].

It appears this problem is caused by the document being saved when running on a machine with Asian language support (which I don't have installed).

The solution is as follows :-

1) Save the .pptx file to a folder on your PC (C:\Temp\PPT1.pptx in my example)

2) Rename the .pptx file to .zip (PPT1.zip in my example)

3) Use "Extract All" to extract all the files from the .zip file into a set of folders (creating C:\Temp\PPT1 folder and sub-folders in my example)

4) Use Notepad++ to "Replace in Files" with "In all sub-folders" enabled and replace all latinLnBrk="1" with latinLnBrk="0"

5) Use "Compress to" to zip up the contents of the folder to a new .zip file (PPT2.zip in my example)

6) Rename the .zip file to .pptx (PPT2.zip to PPT2.pptx in my example)

7) When you open the PowerPoint file (PPT2.pptx in my example) the text will now be correctly wrapped at the spaces between the words.

That was a whole lot more complex than it should be for a Sunday afternoon!

If anyone runs into this problem frequently let me know and I'll write a small app to fix the files.


Alternative method :

1. From PowerPoint use File>Save As and change the Save as type to "PowerPoint XML Presentation (*.xml)".
2. Open the XML file in NotePad
3. Choose Edit>Replace
4. In the Find what field, type latinLnBrk="1"
5. In the Replace with field, type latinLnBrk="0"
6. Choose Replace All
7. Save the file and close NotePad
8. Open PowerPoint and use File>Open to find and reopen the XML version. Resave in the normal PowerPoint pptx format. All English text will now break normally.