finding missing periods in long documents and in included tables, then inserting

[Wendy via OfficeKB.com]

I am reformatting a large number of long documents and have completed much of
the work, including placing some of the content in tables. I am now searching
for instances of missing periods and inserting them. I can use find and
replace to find the end of a word followed by a paragraph mark, then manually
insert the period if it is actually a sentence (some of these instances are
fragments and I do not want to insert periods following them). This works
(painfully) for most text that is not within a table, but within a table I
need a different solution. Within the table, if a hard return has not been
entered, there is no paragraph mark. Instead, you see a small, grey box. I
have not found any way to find the end of a word followed by one of these.
And, as above, some of these instances are fragments and will not need
periods.

Can anyone help me to
1 - find and replace missing periods in text more easily?
2 - find and replace missing periods in table cells?

I can not do or use any VBA programming to accomplish this.

Thanks for any help!

Wendy

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

For the first question... An additional way to try to find sentences without
periods would be to look for the following pattern:

[lowercase letter][space(s)][uppercase letter]

....on the theory that capitals that follow lowercases stand a good chance of
being the first word in a sentence (although, they could as easily be proper
names).

To do this, in the Find and Replace dialog:

Find what[a-z])( @)([A-Z])

Replace with:\1.\2\3

Make sure Use Wildcards is checked.

The Replace with uses \1 - \3 tokens for the three parenthetical expressions
in the Find What: field. It then inserts a period at the end of the orphaned
sentence, then puts in the space(s) and the letter that begins the following
sentence.

This will find a number of non-sentence breaks. There's also a chance that
if a sentence should end with a question mark, this particular replace can
only do one punctuation mark at a time... a period in this instance.

 

[Wendy via OfficeKB.com]

Herb - thanks for your response. I tried your suggestion and it's a nice
solution for many situations, but these documents are instructions which
include a lot of references to buttons. menus, fields and screens, all of
which are capitalized, and many of which are multi-word. Here's an example:

"Click the Display button. The Display Options dialog box displays "

Note the missing period at the end of the second sentence.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks,

Wendy

For the first question... An additional way to try to find sentences without
periods would be to look for the following pattern:

[lowercase letter][space(s)][uppercase letter]

...on the theory that capitals that follow lowercases stand a good chance of
being the first word in a sentence (although, they could as easily be proper
names).

To do this, in the Find and Replace dialog:

Find what[a-z])( @)([A-Z])

Replace with:\1.\2\3

Make sure Use Wildcards is checked.

The Replace with uses \1 - \3 tokens for the three parenthetical expressions
in the Find What: field. It then inserts a period at the end of the orphaned
sentence, then puts in the space(s) and the letter that begins the following
sentence.

This will find a number of non-sentence breaks. There's also a chance that
if a sentence should end with a question mark, this particular replace can
only do one punctuation mark at a time... a period in this instance.

I am reformatting a large number of long documents and have completed much
of

[quoted text clipped - 22 lines]

Wendy

 

[Kathy]

A manual proofread would be the best solution.

It's surprising how many other inconsistencies you'll find when you do that.

Kathy

Herb - thanks for your response. I tried your suggestion and it's a nice
solution for many situations, but these documents are instructions which
include a lot of references to buttons. menus, fields and screens, all of
which are capitalized, and many of which are multi-word. Here's an example:

"Click the Display button. The Display Options dialog box displays "

Note the missing period at the end of the second sentence.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks,

Wendy

For the first question... An additional way to try to find sentences without
periods would be to look for the following pattern:

[lowercase letter][space(s)][uppercase letter]

...on the theory that capitals that follow lowercases stand a good chance of
being the first word in a sentence (although, they could as easily be proper
names).

To do this, in the Find and Replace dialog:

Find what[a-z])( @)([A-Z])

Replace with:\1.\2\3

Make sure Use Wildcards is checked.

The Replace with uses \1 - \3 tokens for the three parenthetical expressions
in the Find What: field. It then inserts a period at the end of the orphaned
sentence, then puts in the space(s) and the letter that begins the following
sentence.

This will find a number of non-sentence breaks. There's also a chance that
if a sentence should end with a question mark, this particular replace can
only do one punctuation mark at a time... a period in this instance.

I am reformatting a large number of long documents and have completed much
of

[quoted text clipped - 22 lines]

Wendy