Can I delete a line of text without deleting hard return?

[Paulette]

During my "dream days" of WordPerfect, I could delete a line of text by
holding down the Control key and striking the End key. This would delete the
text and leave the hard return at the end of the line. Does Word have a
similar key stroke?

 

[Peter T. Daniels]

In Word, there isn't a hard return at the end of each line.

You need to select whatever you want to delete.

If you want to delete the content of an entire paragraph but not its
paragraph mark, you can triple-click in the paragraph and then type
Shift-Left Arrow (to unselect the paragraph mark), then Backspace or
Delete. (You'd do this to preserve the formatting of the deleted
content, so it is applied to whatever you type in its place; if you
simply delete the whole paragraph, when you type a new paragraph in
the same place, it inherits the formatting of the paragraph before or
after it (depending whether you typed Enter with the cursor at the end
of the preceding or the start of the following paragraph.))

There's an option to "Use smart paragraph selection" that Help says
includes the paragraph mark when you select a paragraph, but since
that happens anyway, I don't know what it does.

 

[Gordon Bentley-Mix on news.microsoft.com]

Takes a few more keystrokes in Word unfortunately.

If the text is on multiple lines, position your cursor at the start of the
text to be deleted, Press Ctrl+Shift+Down Arrow (to select to the start of
the next paragraph), Shift+Left Arrow (to deselect the paragraph mark),
Delete.

If the text is all on a single line you can replace Ctrl+Shift+Down Arrow
with Shift+End. And if you omit the Shift+Left Arrow, this will work to
select and delete the text from the cursor to the end of a line in the middle
of a paragraph as well.

In addition, you can extend the selection "backwards" instead of "forwards"
but using Shift+Home or Ctrl+Shift+Up Arrow.

My suggestion: turn on the non-printing character visibility (so you can see
exactly what's being selected) and have a play with the different
combinations of Ctrl, Shift, Home, End and the Arrow keys. For instance,
Ctrl+Shift+End selects from the cursor to the end of the document, while
Ctrl+Shift+Home selects from the cursor to the beginning...
--
Cheers!

Gordon Bentley-Mix
Word MVP

Please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup.

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[Graham Mayor]

It would be easy enough to recreate this with a macro.
The following will delete from the cursor position to the end of the current
paragraph, leaving the paragraph mark (hard return).

Sub DeleteToEndOfPara
Dim oRng As Range
Set oRng = Selection.Range
oRng.End = oRng.Paragraphs(1).Range.End - 1
oRng.Delete
End Sub

CTRL+End is already assigned to a keyboard shortcut. You could re-assign it
or use another that has not been assigned such as Alt+Ctrl+End -
http://www.gmayor.com/installing_macro.htm

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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