Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Office Productivity: Find and Replace Paragraph Marks

Today I was working on a project (aka Resident Educator paperwork) and I learned a Tech Tip in Office Productivity myself. J

I had an email message and I wanted to copy the text into a form.  The comments were in response to an observation and I needed them to be on a special paper.  But when I pasted it the file formatting was not filling the page and it had too many “paragraphs”.  

In Tech a paragraph is a hard return, not what you think of as a paragraph from English class.
Anyway, I wanted them gone but I didn’t want to click and delete over and over. Hmmm!

That’s when I thought of find & replace. 

I use it all the time to replace he in a document to she, and that is where I found exactly what I was looking for. 
Click on Replace in a Word document Home Ribbon.  Click in the find what box and select the special button at the bottom of the window.  

Voila!  There is paragraph and a dozen or so other formatting characters that you might want to find and/or replace.  After selecting paragraph mark I then selected the replace field and typed a space (you cannot see it. 
Select replace all. Close the window and the text looks a lot better. Doesn't it?


What would you do to remove the > marks? Hmmm!