Updating an ancient Word File

[PT]

Back in 1994, I created a Word file consisting of sets of sentences, one to
a line, each followed by a hard paragraph marker (^P).

Now, when I open some of these old files for the first time, my Word 2003
opens them with an automatic page break after each line, so the document is
several hundred pages long with a single line at the top of each otherwise
empty page.

I tried to delete the page breaks, but they're apparently the way the file
is laid out and resist deletion.

Can you suggest an easy way to allow me quickly to condense the 174 page
document into a 174 liner?

 

[Jay Freedman]

Back in 1994, I created a Word file consisting of sets of sentences, one to
a line, each followed by a hard paragraph marker (^P).

Now, when I open some of these old files for the first time, my Word 2003
opens them with an automatic page break after each line, so the document is
several hundred pages long with a single line at the top of each otherwise
empty page.

I tried to delete the page breaks, but they're apparently the way the file
is laid out and resist deletion.

Can you suggest an easy way to allow me quickly to condense the 174 page
document into a 174 liner?

View the document in Normal View. Can you see a dotted line across the screen
with "Page Break" in the center? If so, you should be able to select the line
like any other character and delete it. If not -- if you see a dotted line but
no words in the center of it -- then they aren't caused by page break
characters, so read on...

It's possible that the paragraphs have "Page break before" formatting. A quick
way to tell: If you turn on nonprinting characters by pressing the ¶ button on
the toolbar, does each paragraph have a small black square in the left margin?

If so, first check the definition of the paragraph style that's applied to the
text. If it contains "Page break before", modify the style, click Format >
Paragraph in the Modify dialog, go to the Line and Page Breaks tab of the
Paragraph dialog, and uncheck that box.

If it isn't part of the style but is applied individually to each paragraph,
then select all (Ctrl+A) and press Ctrl+Q to remove the direct (non-style)
formatting.

 

[PT]

Paragraph Formatting showed that somehow, "Spacing After" had been converted
to 654.3 points !!. Using Ctrl-A and changing ithe setting back to )
restored the document.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Yikes!