Replacing "invisible" characters
Cleaning up Word and Publisher documents
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I was teaching a Publisher class recently and I was showing the participants how to replace all of the extra "returns" and "tabs" in the document without having to do it individually. Of course they asked if it was on my blog and I had to admit that it wasn't, so now it is! To view these invisible characters you need to click on the Show/Hide option on the Home Tab, Paragraph Group.
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This tip uses the Replace dialog box which is generally employed when you want to find all of the occurrences of ABC Moving and change it to Sam's Charting but it can also be used to replace "invisible" characters. Invisible characters are things like paragraph returns, tab characters and manual line breaks. As you can imagine it's hard to replace these characters because you certainly can't type a return or a tab or a line break into the box...or can you? Well, if you know the code for those characters or if you know where you can find those codes you can.
When you open the Replace dialog box (Home Tab, Editing Group, Replace) you will see the Find what and Replace with options. Click in the Find what box and click the "More>>>" option. Next click the "Special" option. A list of all of the invisible characters will be displayed.
If you are trying to remove all of the double returns that people like to insert in their documents to add space between paragraphs, you would click twice on the Paragraph Character option and ^p^p would be inserted in the Find what box. Move to the Replace with box and either click the "Special" option again or, now that you know what the code is, just type ^p in the box.
Finally, click the "Replace all" button. All occurrences of the double returns will be removed, replaced with a single return. If people have inserted more than two consecutive returns in the document, you may have to click the Replace all button again. Repeat this until there are "0" replacements.
Here's a list of popular character codes. NOTE: these codes are always written in lower case.
Returns - ^p
Line breaks - ^l
Tabs - ^t
Manual page break - ^m
Non-breaking space - ^s
Section break - ^b
I use this replace information often in Word and Publisher if I have copied text from the internet. Internet documents are notoriously filled with line breaks and non-breaking spaces. If you use Publisher you'll need to write these codes down because they are not supplied for you the way they are in Word...go figure.
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This tip uses the Replace dialog box which is generally employed when you want to find all of the occurrences of ABC Moving and change it to Sam's Charting but it can also be used to replace "invisible" characters. Invisible characters are things like paragraph returns, tab characters and manual line breaks. As you can imagine it's hard to replace these characters because you certainly can't type a return or a tab or a line break into the box...or can you? Well, if you know the code for those characters or if you know where you can find those codes you can.
When you open the Replace dialog box (Home Tab, Editing Group, Replace) you will see the Find what and Replace with options. Click in the Find what box and click the "More>>>" option. Next click the "Special" option. A list of all of the invisible characters will be displayed.
If you are trying to remove all of the double returns that people like to insert in their documents to add space between paragraphs, you would click twice on the Paragraph Character option and ^p^p would be inserted in the Find what box. Move to the Replace with box and either click the "Special" option again or, now that you know what the code is, just type ^p in the box.
Finally, click the "Replace all" button. All occurrences of the double returns will be removed, replaced with a single return. If people have inserted more than two consecutive returns in the document, you may have to click the Replace all button again. Repeat this until there are "0" replacements.
Here's a list of popular character codes. NOTE: these codes are always written in lower case.
Returns - ^p
Line breaks - ^l
Tabs - ^t
Manual page break - ^m
Non-breaking space - ^s
Section break - ^b
I use this replace information often in Word and Publisher if I have copied text from the internet. Internet documents are notoriously filled with line breaks and non-breaking spaces. If you use Publisher you'll need to write these codes down because they are not supplied for you the way they are in Word...go figure.
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Happy computing!
Diane
Happy computing!
Diane
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