In Newspaper class, we write out the articles using Word 2000. One student always feels the need to place random spaces between every word and sentence; absolutely none are spaced correctly and some have five or even six spaces between each other. He also refuses to tab, instead spacing in a couple times until it looks all right.
This may be fine for him, but I’m the editor and I have to go in and fix this sort of thing. For the first article I went in and manually fixed the spacing and tabs. That was all right because it was a short article anyway. However, his newest creation is rather longer and I don’t want to do it manually.
My question: is there an easier way? Please tell me if so.
In MS Word for Mac, you can use the replace (in the Edit menu) to change two spaces to one. If he is using more than two spaces, just click replace all a few times. What I’d do is to tell the students not to put in extra spaces. And the next time (or maybe this time), I’d give the file back to the student and tell him to correct it.
You can make it easier. Search for a period followed by 3 spaces, and and Replace wit a period followed by 2 spaces. Move to the top of doc and repete til a “Not Found” prompt.
You can do the same thing searching for commas/colons/etc. followed by 2 spaces.
Come to think of it, you can just search for a selectively replace strings of 3 spaces. D’oh!
I don’t think you can use global characters in Word search and replace, but I may be wrong.
Yeah, what they said. Use the Edit --> Replace function.
If you only search and replace spaces, however, it sounds like you’ll still wind up with a space at the start of each paragraph, which is probably not what you want. You can undo that through another global Replace: search for paragraph mark (^p) plus space, and replace it with paragraph mark plus tab (^t). That’ll give you a tab at the beginning of each paragraph where the student originally used spaces for the indent.
Thanks guys! I’ll try it when I get back to school. And I may try to get the teacher to ask the student to stop with the weird spacing, too. Thanks again.
yojimboguy, nope. He was using a different computer for the first article; the second, longer one was used on another computer. I think he’s just being weird.
