Search and replace

[jldube]

I'm using Word 2003, and recently had a problem with a document prepared by
someone else: the originator, instead of formatting the document for double
spacing, manually placed two hard returns at the end of each line.
Subsequently, I had to add some text to the document, and I did not put
manual returns, as I was not aware of what the originator had done. So, I
had some lines that had two hard returns at the end of the line, and some
that had automatic returns (single-spaced). What I wanted to do was search
for the two hard returns, and replace them with nothing, and then I was going
to select the whole document, and use a macro I've created for double
spacing.

However, I was not able to find the character in the search dialog box for
the manual hard return. Does it exist? I ultimately fixed the document line
by line, but would like to know what to do if this situation occurs again.

Thank you for your time.

Jeannine Dube

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Search for ^p^p and replace with a space or nothing as appropriate. Keep in
mind that this may reduce all the text to a single paragraph, so you may
want to find the actual paragraph breaks first and replace them with
something distinctive that you can later replace with ^p.

 

[jldube]

This worked great, and I thank you very much.

I hate to sound really ignorant, but where do I find the ^p character in the
replace dialog box? Is it found anywhere in the "special" section? Is there a
list somewhere that I'm not seeing?

Thanks again for your time.

Jeannine

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

It's "Paragraph mark" at the very top of the list.

 

[jldube]

I KNEW that it would be something simple that I had missed. Thank you so much
! I love this board---it always answers my questions promptly, and accurately.

Jeannine Dube

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I noticed that, with the Find dialog in its default center-screen location,
that list pops up (rather than down), making items at the top of the list
less obvious than those lower down. Extremes always seem to be easy to
overlook, anyway.