Formatting question. Please help.

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
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G

Guest

I have transferred text from an apple word program by copy and pasting it
into an email and then copy and pasting it again into Microsoft Word (it was
a last option). It worked, except there are huge random spaces between words
in all the text that was copied this way. How can I format this text to
return the spacing between words to normal. I'm pulling my hair out trying to
work it out. I'd be most grateful to anyone who can save me having to format
hundreds of pages of word documents, line by line.
 
Are the spaces true spaces (display formatting characters with CTRL+*) or
are they a result of some bizarre formatting anomaly? If the former, try a
wildcard replace of
space@{1,}
with
space

or

if there are tabs in the max, replace (not wildcard)
^w
with
space
then select all the text and align to centre (CTRL+E) then align left
(CTRL+L) to get rid of leading spaces.

If the spaces are layout anomalies, apply a paragraph style then CTRL+Space
to reset the text to that style.

If these don't work, send me small sample via the link on my web site so I
can see what we are dealing with. I would warn, however, that I am in the
process of emigrating and so I cannot guarantee to respond quickly.

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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In addition to Graham's answer, see also:

http://word.mvps.org/faqs/formatting/CleanWebText.htm
For some potentially helpful basics.

And for future reference--I'm not sure what Apple word processing program
you were using, but I'm pretty sure all of them have a Save As RTF (Rich
Text Format) option in recent versions, and you could have saved as RTF,
emailed the attachment to yourself, and then opened the RTF document in
Word, no problem. It may still be worth doing this, assuming you have
access to both computers.

If you expect to do this again, post back saying which Apple program, I can
maybe be more specific. If you were using MS Word on the Mac, the file would
have transferred easily no action needed.
 
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