Remove single quotation marks not apostrophes

[greggsewell]

I have a 200-plus-page document with many words and phrases surrounded by
single quotation marks. These have all been replaced with smart (curly)
quotation marks.

I need to remove all of the single quotation marks but leave the apostrophes
in contractions alone.

Examples:

Need to remove:

'Bob'
'Bob and friends'
'Bob and many friends'
etc.

Need to leave alone:

don't
we'll
can't

I've read and read on the topic of Find and Replace, regular expressions,
and wildcards. It seems to me that Word's Find and Replace can do this, but I
cannot find an example that shows me how, and I'm not expert enough to deduce
on my own how to set up a regular expression to get the job done.

I'm using Microsoft Word X for Mac Service Release 1

Thanks for your help.

 

[grammatim]

You could use Find-Replace: type in the first box Space-Apostrophe,
leave the second box empty, and click Replace All; then change the
first box to Apostrophe-Space and choose Replace All again. This will
catch all except the ones at the start or end of a paragraph; to
remove those, do it twice more with ^p-Apostrophe and with Apostrophe-
^p (don't type the hyphen in any of the four, of course!)

 

[greggsewell]

Ah!

Thank you, thank you. I was trying to make it more complex than it has to be.

All best,

Gregg

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Note, however, that this won't take care of cases where there is punctuation
after the single quote (UK style).

 

[greggsewell]

Quite right, Suzanne. Fortunately, the manuscript I'm copyediting is American
style.

I appreciate your input.

Gregg

 

[Graham Mayor]

If these are single smart quotes then the following macro should remove them
all whilst leaving smart apostrophes.

Sub RemoveSingleQuotes()
Dim vFindText As Variant
Dim vReplText As Variant
Dim i As Long

vFindText = Array(Chr(145), "^0146([!a-z])")
vReplText = Array("", "\1")
With Selection
.HomeKey Unit:=wdStory
With .Find
.ClearFormatting
.Replacement.ClearFormatting
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
.MatchWholeWord = True
.MatchWildcards = True
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
.Format = True
.MatchCase = True

For i = LBound(vFindText) To UBound(vFindText)
.Text = vFindText(i)
.Replacement.Text = vReplText(i)
.Execute replace:=wdReplaceAll
Next i
End With
End With
End Sub

http://www.gmayor.com/installing_macro.htm