Can I "Find and Replace" to change sentence spacing?

[Robert Judge]

In WORD 2003, I am used to using "Find and Replace" to change text in a
document, for instance, changing all instances of the word "Monday" to
"Tuesday."

I want to change the spacing of sentences in a large WORD document from one
space between sentences to two spaces. Can I use the "Find and Replace" (or
any other) functiion to do that and if so, how?

I will appreciate advice.

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

Probably not reliably... without a very smart macro. The problem is that
periods (as well as question marks and exclamation marks) don't occur
exclusively at the end of sentences. I.e., e.g., etc. are a few examples.
So, you could arbitrarily change:

..[space]

to

..[space][space]

....and do the same for ?[space] and ![space]. But there would be mistakes.

You can set Word's grammar/style checker to flag a single space as an error.
But, that doesn't fix the occurrences... it merely nags you about them.

The larger question, however, is why on earth you'd want to do this. With
proportionally spaced fonts, a single space after sentence punctuation is
the industry standard these days. Editors all over the world spend lots of
hours lecturing those of us who learned to write on typewriters to change
our habits.