How do I remove all carriage returns from a Word document?

G

guest in calif

Does anyone have a quick solution to remove all carriage returns from a Word
document?

I would also like to know how to remove empty lines in excel that result
when I cut and paste data from PDF's, or other sources. They are often merged
cells, and I can do it, but it takes several steps. ie-select all, click
"merge" cells off, then select all, and sort. This often changes the order
of the data, which I don't want to do.
 
S

Suzanne S. Barnhill

All carriage returns or just extra ones (empty paragraphs)? You can search
for ^p and replace with nothing or search for ^p^p and replace with ^p,
depending on which you want to do.
 
G

guest in calif

Hi Suzanne,

Maybe I'm more of a novice than I thought :). I'm trying to remove all
extraneous CR's that were found in the body of an email, so that it will read
like a regular letter. I copied the body of the email (from excite.com) into
MS Word, but can't get rid of the CR's w/o going from one line to the next,
deleting the CR manually (ie, w/the backspace key). This takes too much
time. Is there a quick formatting solution?
 
G

grammatim

Find/Replace (Ctrl-H)

Assuming that paragraphs are divided by an extra paragraph mark,

1. In the Find box, type ^p^p

In the Replace box, type ^l (small L)

Click Replace All

2a. (assuming there's a space between the last word on each line and
the paragraph mark)

In the Find box, type ^p

Clear the Replace box entirely

Click Replace All

2b (if there's no space between the last word on each line and the
paragraph mark)

In the Find box, type ^p

In the Replace box, type one space (you won't see anything)

Click Replace All

3. In the Find box, type ^l (small L)

In the Replace box, type ^p

Click Replace All
 
G

guest in calif

Thanks so much to both of you!!!!

I failed to mention that the search for ^p yielded nothing, since I now know
that it stands for the backwards P that indicates a CR. My data had the
symbol that looks like a backward L w/an arrow on the L side (like what is
printed on the "enter" key)
which evidently (thanks to grammatim reading my mind) also indicates a CR.
I formatted the whole thing in seconds.

Is there a list of such abbreviations anywhere?

--------------------------
 
M

mt_si_dad

In help, search for "Find and replace paragraph breaks, page breaks, and
other items" and scroll down to "Use codes to find letters, formatting,
fields, or special characters"

note that it's lower-case "p" and "l"

A hint that I use -- since it's possible that there are "^l" marks I want to
keep, I do this

1. Find/Replace all doubled "^p" marks with "&&&" (a combination of
characters I'm very unlikely to have in my documents.
2. Find/Replace all single "^p" marks with a single space (so a sentence cut
in half won't have the two wordsjumbled together like that)
3. Find/Replace all "&&&" with "^p^p" (or, if I'm using the default Normal
style in Word 2007, a single "^p", because Word 2007's Normal style has an
automatic extra space after each paragraph.

This is fairly useful, even if it's not perfect -- you'll need to be aware
of text areas such as an e-mail header area where there is only a single line
separating things like the address, subject, and date.

If you select the text area first (highlight it) and *then* use
Find/Replace, it finds/replaces only in the selected text, saving you this
problem.
 
S

Suzanne S. Barnhill

If you expand the Replace dialog and click Special, you'll get a list of
special codes you can insert. ^l is a line break (inserted with
Shift+Enter).
 

Ask a Question

Want to reply to this thread or ask your own question?

You'll need to choose a username for the site, which only take a couple of moments. After that, you can post your question and our members will help you out.

Ask a Question

Top