Sorting paragraphs.

[Kenny]

Fairly large document, many paragraphs with a line break between each.
Would like to sort by first letter of each paragraph. Only Sort option I
can find is in the Table menu. Odd thing is that this will sort the
paragraphs descending Z-A OK but trying to sort ascending A-Z get strange
results. Any help appreciated.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Table | Sort is the way to go. Don't know why you're getting strange
results. Can you describe how they are "strange"?

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.mvps.org/word
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Kenny]

Seems to split the document into columns and not sequential, hard to
explain. This doc wasn't created in Word, it was scanned using Abby
Finereader OCR program, the few errors corrected then converted to Word doc.
I suspect the problem has something to do with that. Seem to remember a
similar problem some years ago with Win98 &Word 97 was solved by using a
utility which removed all formatting. I'm now using Office/Word XP, can't
remember what that utility was and if there's something similar for XP.

 

[Mike Williams [MVP]]

Seems to split the document into columns and not sequential, hard to
explain. This doc wasn't created in Word, it was scanned using Abby
Finereader OCR program, the few errors corrected then converted to
Word doc. I suspect the problem has something to do with that. Seem
to remember a similar problem some years ago with Win98 &Word 97 was
solved by using a utility which removed all formatting. I'm now
using Office/Word XP, can't remember what that utility was and if
there's something similar for XP.

One easy way to remove formatting is to paste everything into Notepad. Then
re-select from Notepad and copy back to a fresh Word document.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Scanned documents, as I understand it, often use a lot of frames, so that
could be part of the problem. You can remove the frames with Ctrl+A, Ctrl+Q,
but this will remove all other direct paragraph formatting as well.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.mvps.org/word
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Kenny]

Thanks for the replies but none of the suggestions worked. The utility I
used previously in Word 97 is Fixmail from:
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_download/0,fid,6092,fileidx,1,00.asp
but I can't get it to work in Word XP. I'm assuming th VB code needs
altered but I don't know how. Anyone care for a challenge getting this to
work in Word XP?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Another thing that would affect sorting would be the presence of line breaks
instead of paragraph breaks. Do you have nonprinting characters displayed so
that you can distinguish?

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.mvps.org/word
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.