Sometimes I copy text from a web page into a Word document. On the web page the text was divided into paragraphs, but in Word each line of the paragraph has a carriage return symbol (is there a more modern turn for this?) at the end.
Is there a way in Word to select a section of text and convert it to one paragraph even if each line is considered a paragraph to itself?
Not that I’ve discovered (in Word2000). What I’ve done is prepare a macro which basically replaces all the instances of a single paragraph mark (^p) with a space, which gets rid of all the annoying line breaks you’re talking about. You don’t need a macro to do this, of course – you can just use Edit --> Replace – but I use it so often that I decided to macro-ize it.
Is it a paragraph mark (a funny looking ‘P’) or a Manual Line Break (an arrow that goes down and to the left.)
Go into Edit Replace
Click the More button.
Click on Special and select Paragraph Mark.
(or Manual Line Break)
Now you can replace all paragraph marks with nothing or a space or whatever.
I’ve used these techniques before - actually, I’ve had to make more complicated macros because simply replacing paragraph marks with spaces means that there will be no longer any divisions between the original paragraphs.
I’ve been dealing with this problem since Word 2.0 - I was just sort of hoping that by now Microsoft would have come up with a built in solution.
Oh well.
Yeah, I completely understand that “Oh well” feeling.
If you’re using Netscape, you might try using Internet Explorer. The end-of-the-line problem doesn’t seem to happen when you’re pasting text from IE. The downside with using IE is that it also pastes in photos, links, and other junk that you might not want.
One thing that I’ve done as long as I can remember when copying and pasting PARTICULARLY using Office is to first paste to notepad.exe, select all, copy from notepad, then paste into Word (or Excel).
More often than not, Word wants to retain all the formatting (try c/p’ing an entire web page…Word will damn near hang on you).
When you c/p into notepad first, it strips all the hidden code giving you just the ASCII. Which is normally what I’m after. I can then format in Word as needed.
This has proven to be the absolute quickest way for me…and I can beat anyone at the office doing it my way when they’re presented with that task.
Of course, I’m a keyboard wizard, too…which gives me an edge.
NJK
You can achieve the same result in most (all?) Office applicaitions using Edit|Paste Special|Unformatted text
If the HTML text contains a line break, “<br>”, then if you do a plain post they are replaced with Manual Line Breaks, but if you do Paste Special Unformatted text, they come out as paragraph breaks.