length of text lines

[demarie]

I frequently have long documents emailed to me in
plaintext format, to be edited in Word 2000. The length
of the text lines usually is too short, and I have been
correcting each line manually. I have tried changing
margins and formatting paragraphs, but nothing seems to
work. Does anyone have a quick fix for this problem?
Denise

 

[Charles Kenyon]

Press Ctrl-Shift-* to see the paragraph marks. There's your problem,
hundreds of paragraphs, one line each.

I do a Replace. First replace ^p^p with xxxxyxxxx. Then replace ^p with a
space. Then replace xxxxyxxxx with ^p. You'll still have to do some
adjustments but this will take care of the bulk of your problems.

If you have a crooked arrow instead of a paragraph mark at the end of the
lines, use ^l instead of ^p in the first two replaces, but then use ^p in
the final one.

You can find these codes by clicking the More button on the Replace dialog
and then clicking on Special. ^p is a paragraph mark, ^l is a manual line
break.

Hope this helps. Happy New Year!
--

Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory:
<URL: http://addbalance.com/word/index.htm>

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide)
<URL: http://addbalance.com/usersguide/index.htm>

See also the MVP FAQ: <URL: http://www.mvps.org/word/> which is awesome!
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[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

See http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/Formatting/CleanWebText.htm

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.mvps.org/word
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[Graham Mayor]

The 'stripmail' utility linked from the download page of my web site makes
this an even simpler task than the usual methods suggested by Suzanne and
Charles.

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP
E-mail (e-mail address removed)
Web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site www.mvps.org/word
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[demarie]

Thank you to all who replied. I have tried all three
methods suggested, and am grateful for the time you took
to help.
Denise