Tip #114 - Replacing Text in Word

100 (or more) Computer Tips in 100 (or more) Days

Tip #114 - Replacing Text in Word & Publisher - Including Special Characters

A variation on Finding text in Word is Replacing text. Most people will think about using this tool in their last proposal to change all of the occurrences of “ABC Moving” with “Acme Moving & Storage”. While that is a helpful use of Replace, I use it to clean up documents that I copy from the internet or that clients send me. They are often filled with manual line breaks, extra spaces and unneeded paragraph marks.

To use the Replace feature click the Replace option on the Home tab, Editing group. In the dialog box click the More button on the left side and then click the Special menu to view the options. If I wanted to replace all of the manual line breaks with a space I would find “Manual Line Break” in the list and click on it. Word inserts the code for that (^l) in the Find What box. Now click in the Replace with box and tap the spacebar once. You won’t see anything in the Replace with box but the character has been inserted. Now click the Replace All button and all of the manual line breaks have been replaced with a space. Once you use this a few times you don’t have to click on the More button and Special, you can just type the code ^l (l for line break) and click on Replace All.

Another code that I use frequently is ^p for Paragraph Return. I am often sent documents  that I need to import into newsletters or brochures. The client has typed the document using two returns after each paragraph. This has to be stripped out for my purposes.  In the Find what box I will type ^p^p and in the Replace with box I type one ^p. This is telling the program to find every occurrence of the Return/Enter key being struck twice and change it to one return, thereby removing the extra returns between the paragraphs.

Another example of this is when people get carried away using the Tab key in an effort to make nicely spaced columns. They will create lists by typing something like the first name at the left margin and then press the Tab key two or three times and type the last name. They will again tab two or three more times before typing the phone number or other piece of information. These extra tabs need to be removed before this information can be put in a table or used in another format. In the Find what box I will type the Tab code of ^t^t and in the Replace with box I again use ^t. In this case I don’t want to remove all of the tabs, just those areas of the document where there are multiple characters together. After I click on the Replace all option I will often click on Replace all again. I am reading the search report looking for zero replacements made. Then I know that the document is free of these offending double (triple?) tabs. 

Happy Computing!

Diane

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