Removing hard returns (Word 97)

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How can I quickly remove returns (CR and LF?) from text that I paste into Word, and force the margins to conform to my page setup?

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If you highlight the text and use Edit, Replace and enter ^p in the Find what box and leave the Replace with box empty and click Replace All it should do the trick for you.

If the text has paragraphs from the use of 2 hard returns, and you wnat to main thos paragraphs, before you do above search for ^p^p and repace with some code that is not used in the text (use something like an en-dash which is ^=). Then carry out the above and when you have done that replace the en-dash (or whatever you used) with ^p^p. the ^ charcter is got by pressing Shift 6.

Andrew C

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Thanks for you prompt reply! Apparently I need a little more.

I tested with text off a web page, and tried the replace on the entire thing. It removed all returns, however, all paragraphs become combined into one. Also, there were spaces preceding each row on the pasted text. Those spaces remained, leaving me with a document with several 15+ length spaces between words where the old CRs were. I understand that I could eliminate merging paragraphs by replacing one paragraph at a time, but I don’t want to! (I don’t suppose you can specify to change all “^p” only if it’s not part of a “^p^p”!) Also, I want to remove that extra word spacing without having to repeatedly replace strings of blanks with single blanks. I would think that MS should include a way to do this formatting in one shot, but I’m beginning to think I’ll need a macro..

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Martha,

First you need to mark the actual paragraph breaks. What I do is replace “^p^p” with something like “xxx” (or, as Andrew suggested, “^=”);
then you can replace all of the remaining “^p”s with a space or nothing.

Then you replace all “xxx”s with “^p”.

Then you search for 2 word spaces and replace with one space. Just keep hitting “Replace all” till it stops finding any.

Hope this is what you need.

Lin

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That’s the way I normally do it as well. But first be sure to use paste special / unformatted text instead of the normal paste command, this will enforce the pasted text to respect your page setup and automatically format it in the current style.

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You can also take an intermediate step and first paste into a program like Textsoap (I’m sure there are others, textsoap is not free), process the text there- often one click does it- then copy and paste into word. For me this is more pain free than figuring it out in word”s find and replace 95% of the time.

Dave

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Hi Martha:

One more thing that often works is to select the pasted text & press Ctrl+Shift+K (which is autoformat). This will remove extra line & paragraph marks, as well as do some other formatting. If it doesn’t do exactly what you want, you can change some of the options under Tools/AutoCorrect…/Autoformat tab.

Hope this helps.

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