Help using wildcard to eliminate extra space after periods

[Mclan]

I'm working on old Word documents that have two spaces after the periods, and
I need to eliminate one space. I'd like to be able to change them all in one
fell swoop, and I think I should be able to do that with wildcards in Find
and Replace.

I've been studying the use of wildcards--I'm having a lot of trouble
figuring out what to put in the Find and Replace boxes to achieve my goal of
eliminating one space after the periods. Can anyone help me? Many thanks!!

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Unless there are a lot of instances of more than two spaces, or unless you
have some instances of two or more spaces that you want to retain, I would
suggest just replacing two spaces with one throughout the document. I
usually rerun the Replace All until it finds no more instances. There's a
wildcard expression that will do this in one pass, but for me it's quicker
to run Replace several times than to dredge up the correct wildcards. <g>

 

[Soundar]

Hi,

You can give a period and two spaces in “Find what†and then give a period
and single space in “Replace With†box. So that It will convert all period
double space to period with single space.

Regards,
Soundar.

 

[Helmut Weber]

Hi Suzanne,

is there a kind of official use
of two spaces after a period?
What is taught in American schools?

The answer may be: "This or that", I know.

As =rand(5,5) still produces text with two spaces.

--
Greetings from Bavaria, Germany

Helmut Weber, MVP WordVBA

Win XP, Office 2003
"red.sys" & Chr$(64) & "t-online.de"

 

[Mclan]

Thanks for all the replies, I really very much appreciate it. Your
suggestions worked like a charm.

As for two spaces after a period--according to the Chicago Manual of Style,
15th ed (2003), section 6.11 states, "In typeset matter, one space, not two,
follows any mark of punctuation that ends a sentence, whether a period, a
colon, a question mark, an exclamation point, or closing quotation marks."
And from section 2.11, this rule holds true "both in manuscript and in final
published form."

Cathy Miller

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I was taught in typing class to put two spaces after periods and colons, but
that applies only to monospaced fonts. One space suffices for proportional
fonts. Since what's taught now is mostly "keyboading" rather than "typing,"
I would have to hope that the rule has been changed.

Since I use my lorem ipsum AutoText entry to produce dummy text, it wasn't
till I was recently teaching an "Introduction to Microsoft Word" class
lately that I had to use =rand(), and I did notice with dismay the double
spaces there. Of course, =rand() produces more meaningful text in Word 2007,
and I would hope that the spacing would be correct as well.