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

[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.

 

[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.

 

[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?

 

[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

 

[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?

--------------------------

 

[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.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Ah, in that case what you need is the instructions in
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/CleanWebText.htm. Or automate it with
the macro from http://gregmaxey.mvps.org/Clean_Up_Text.htm

 

[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).