How do I wrap text? (Word 2003)

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I’m not quite sure how to ask this question but I’ll try.

I believe I have 2003 Word.
I regularly surf various forums and save interesting posts by copying the post and pasting it in Word. Much of the time, each line of the the post only goes part way across the page — then starts the next line. I’d like the line to go all the way across the page when I paste into word. In “Text Document” I believe this is called “word wrap”. How do I accomplish this in Word?

An example:

Preheat oven to 425.
Rinse chicken inside and out,
then pat dry. Remove excess fat
from the cavities and season
with salt and pepper. Place half
of the lemon inside. Tie legs
together with kitchen string and
place in a roasting pan.

I want it to paste into Word — after copying — like this:

Preheat oven to 425. Rinse chicken inside and out, then pat dry. Remove excess fat from the cavities and season with salt and pepper. Place half of the lemon inside. Tie legs together with kitchen string and place in a roasting pan.

Thanks for any help,
Crockett

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When you paste, are you getting tables, images, etc., or are you pasting only plain text? In some cases you might need to stretch a table cell or manually copy and paste text outside of a table or other container in order to get more control over your text.

In order to get better visibility into why Word is wrapping the text into a narrow column, make sure to turn on nonprinting characters:

(1) Tools > Options…, View tab: tabs, paragraph breaks, manual line breaks, non-breaking spaces

(2) Table > Show gridlines

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The text you are copying contains paragraph marks, which cause Word to start a new line. You can see these if you use Tools > Options > View and set the check box for Paragraph Marks.

You could use Replace to get rid of all the paragraph marks, but then everything in the whole document would be on one paragraph, which probably isn’t what you want.

Usually documents like this have two paragraph marks together when they really want a new paragraph, so we need to find every place where there are 2 paragraph marks together and make sure that we keep one of those paragraph mark. Word’s Find and Replace dialog box uses ^p to find a paragraph mark., so here is how to do this.

Using Word’s Edit > Replace
replace every instance of ^p^p with a text string that you can search for later, for example **HERE**. This will remember where you need new paragraphs for later.
replace every instance of ^p with nothing, this will remove every new paragraph mark in the document
replace every instance of **HERE** with ^p, This will put back the paragraph marks you want to keep.

StuartR

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Welcome to Woody’s Lounge!

Most probably the source text contains line breaks or paragraph breaks. There is no way you can tell Word to ignore these while pasting, but you can remove them after the fact.
StuartR has already pointed out one method to do so. You could also try Format | AutoFormat…; don’t change any settings but simply click OK in the dialog that appears.

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I guess I wasn’t as clear as I needed to be.

What I want to copy looks like my first example (before I copy it) — and copies into word looking the same.

I want it to look like my second example when I copy it into Word.

Thanks,
Crockett

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I did understand you. Have you tried the sequence of replace actions I suggested?

StuartR

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As I already wrote, I don’t think it is possible to make Word paste the text the way you want. You’ll have to paste the text first, then use one of the suggestions provided by StuartR and by me to remove the superfluous line ends.

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StuartR and Hans,

I hadn’t tried what you said — but after you explained that you did understand — I then tried it.

I’m lost!!! I’m sure it’s operator error but I still can’t make it do what I want it to do.

Can you explain it differently — keeping in mind that you’re dealing with a novice. Or are there any other programs that I could use?

Thanks,
Crockett

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If the previous suggestions don’t work, there may be manual line breaks in the text. Try the following:

– Select a block of text that you want to wrap.
– Select Edit | Replace… or press Ctrl+H.
– Enter ^l in the “Find what” box. That is, Shift+6 followed by a lower case L.
– Enter a single space in the “Replace with” box.
– Click the “Replace All” button.
– If Word asks whether you want to search the remainder of the document, reply No.
– Close the Replace dialog.
– If the result doesn’t please you, you can select Edit | Undo or press Ctrl+Z to restore the previous situation.

If that doesn’t work either, could you attach a small sample document that illustrates the problem?

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>If the previous suggestions don’t work, there may be manual line breaks in the text. Try the following:

> Select a block of text that you want to wrap.
> Select Edit | Replace… or press Ctrl+H.
> Enter ^l in the “Find what” box. That is, Shift+6 followed by a lower case L.
> Enter a single space in the “Replace with” box.
> Click the “Replace All” button.
> If Word asks whether you want to search the remainder of the document, reply No.
> Close the Replace dialog.
>Regards,
>Hans

Hans,

This one worked like a charm!!!

I want to thank all of you for your replies and your patience!

Thanks again,
Crockett

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Be sure not to skip JSCHER’s advice about VISIBILITY in his post #701,271.

You’ve got to be able to SEE the culprits that are breaking your lines, before you can remove them. (Well, I have to, anyway.)

I usually leave the setting TOOLS/OPTIONS/VIEW/FORMATTING MARKS set to “ALL”, so that I can see everything that’s happening in the document.

But to toggle that view on and off, press . (That’s the 8/* key, top row of main keyboard).

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I was looking for this same problem and adjusted the response to this:

Using Word’s Edit > Replace
replace every instance of ^p^p with a text string that you can search for later, for example **HERE**. This will remember where you need new paragraphs for later.
replace every instance of ^p with (a space in the Replace with box) , this will remove every new paragraph mark in the document and keep the words separated
replace the **HERE** with ^p^p to recreate the paragraphs

this worked for me

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