copy text using "select text with similar formatting"

[rupert]

I have very long documents to sift through. I have been selecting passages
of text which I need from different parts of the document and giving them the
same style which I call "useful". I then select all these blocks of text
from throughout the document I am working on using the "select text with
similar formatting" option on right click. I copy and paste the text to a
new document. With about ten blocks of text this works fine. However, I can
have 50 such blocks. If I copy and paste these in one go using "select text
with similar formatting", when I paste them, some of the blocks get placed
out of order. I therefore have to work in small blocks which is frustrating
given I have so much to do.
Is this a bug in Word? Can you help?

 

[Terry Farrell]

I don't know why this should happen without looking at the document itself.
However, I would not do the task this way. I'd go through, select the
passages and instead of formatting them, I'd use the Spike command. Then
switch to the new document and Unspike to paste everything spiked into the
new document in the same order in which it was spiked. Note, you can either
save your original document which will remove all the passages you spiked,
or you can close it without saving it and the spike passages will remain
intact.

 

[rupert]

Thanks

I don't know why this should happen without looking at the document itself.
However, I would not do the task this way. I'd go through, select the
passages and instead of formatting them, I'd use the Spike command. Then
switch to the new document and Unspike to paste everything spiked into the
new document in the same order in which it was spiked. Note, you can either
save your original document which will remove all the passages you spiked,
or you can close it without saving it and the spike passages will remain
intact.

 

[rupert]

Hi, what is the Spike command. I checked Word help and found:

Keyboard shortcuts for SmartArt graphics
Help > Accessibility
Keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Office Word
Help > Accessibility

However, searching latter I couldnt see "Spike" anywhere

 

[rupert]

I googled and found spiking.
http://www.rosevines.org/blog/2008/6/18/tip-using-microsoft-words-spike-to-rearrange-text.html

However, its useful for me to be able to highlght text in the original
document so I can see what I've used. hence using a style (i included colour
shading). That way I have an audit trail.

Spiking is handy but not quite same. It does what I wish my method would
which is maintain the order.

I think there must be a bug in the clipboard (may be when I paste more than
a certain number of characters it overflows - just guessing).

 

[Terry Farrell]

I don't think it is the clipboard. I did a test and copied a numbered list
one para at a time so that I had 33 numbered paras on the clipboard. They
all displayed in the correct order.

I then selected that style in the Style Pane option and selected them all
and they again copied and displayed on the clipboard correctly. I then
pasted them in a new document and they were fine. So I am not sure what is
happening to make your selections out of sequence. I'll play a little more
and see if I can 'break' this.

Terry

 

[rupert]

Hi Terry

I have replicated the issue in a small word file as follows:

First line of word doc:

11111111111111111111

Second line:

22222222222222222222222

Third line:

33333333333333333333333333

Fourth line:

44444444444444444444444444444444444444444

Now create a new style called "bluehighlight" and format the even number
rows so they have a blue background using this style.

Copy the entire block of text many times over

So now you have the even rows with background coloured style

Use "Select Text with similar formatting" to get all the even rows. Copy
and paste into a new document.

Observe that the 2 and 4 numbers do not alternate but seem to be at random.

Shows that this is terrible if want to extract common style text from a
document in the original order.

Your feedback very welcome ....

 

[Terry Farrell]

I'll investigate this further over the weekend.

Terry