Bullet problem with Microsoft Word 2007

Question

I'm having a problem with bullets in Word 2007 that is driving me insane. I have two items in a list and I just want each one to be preceded by a bullet, like this:

• This is my first item, which is just one sentence.
• And this is my second item, which is a sentence followed by a list of terms and therefore takes up three lines (in Word): term1, term2, term3, term4, term5, blah, blah, etc.

All I'm trying to get is something like the above: two bullets. There is a paragraph mark at the end of the first item, and one at the end of the list (after "etc.") in the second one. However, Word acts as if the second item is two separate paragraphs, so it's adding a third bullet, no matter what I do. It's looking something like this:

• This is my first item, which is just one sentence.
• And this is my second item, which is a sentence followed by a list of terms and therefore takes up three lines (in Word): term1,
• term2, term3, term4, term5, blah, blah, etc.

(The difference, which I can't recreate here without much effort, is that, in my document, the text wraps to the next line because it's at the end of the line. In other words, "term1" in my document is the last word that will fit on the line. But still, there is no paragraph mark after it.) I have no idea why it's acting like there is another carriage return in there. I've turned formatting marks on and there is nothing else in that text, just words, commas, and spaces. Any help would be appreciated!

UPDATE 11/23: I'm still experiencing this problem, but I've found a workaround. However, I'd still like to know what is causing it because it is annoying as hell. Here are two screenshots. The first one - http://screencast.com/t/ODA3ZDU1OG - shows the problem. There are three bullets here, but there should only be one, on the first line. Now, what I've figured out is that if I copy that text and paste it into a new, blank Word doc, the problem disappears, and it looks like this: http://screencast.com/t/Yzc3YjkzYzE. Does anybody know what is going on? What is it about my regular doc that is screwing up the bullets? Is there a corrupted template or something that I need to delete? (And if so, how?) Thanks in advance!

Solution

Use Maj + Enter. This will add a carriage return instead of a paragraph mark.

Comments

[johnnyb10]

UPDATE: Here is a link to an image that shows what I'm talking about: tinypic.com/view.php?pic=98c5yp&s=4. The problem is that there is a bullet in front of "Dig". But "Dig" is just another in a series of terms separated by commas. It's not a new paragraph, so it should appear without a bullet like the line above it ("to verify functionality...").

[Julien Poulin]

Hi, can you provide an example of word document with the problem? I was unable to reproduce it...

[Arjan]

Shift-Enter :-)

[johnnyb10]

Thanks, but there is no paragraph mark (except at the end of the paragraph, which is where it should be). There are three lines in this paragraph; the first line wraps to the second when it hits the right margin, and therefore, no bullet point appears (which is correct). But then when the second line wraps to the third, a bullet point inexplicably appears in front of the third line. I'll add a link to an image in my original post above.

[johnnyb10]

It would move to the new end-of-line word. Thanks for your suggestion, though (paste into new doc). I think that will work.