Help needed with Word

[watervole]

Can someone please tell me how to find a carriage return in a Word file?

I'm sure there's a perfectly easy way of doing it, but I've no idea what it is.

All I want to do is to be able to replace all occurrences of double carriage return with a single carriage return, but to be able to do that I have to be able to tell the search and replace function how to find a carriage return.

Update - now solved thanks to helpful replies. Thanks everyone!

Comments

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

I would have said it's the same as "enter" but that's a carriage return with line feed. And how you describe it to Word I don't know.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

BUt if I press 'enter' then it doesn't seem to recognise that as a character to search on. ('enter' normally means you've given it a command, so that sort of makes sense)

[aeshna_uk]

Go into the Find and Replace box (will pop up with Ctrl+H) and hit the button that says "More". From there go to the button at the bottom that says "Special". This should give you a little menu of useful things, with the paragraph mark at the top. Select that twice for "Find what", once for "Replace with", and then click "Replace all". I use this all the time for coding stuff and it works fine! :)

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Excellent!

I've just managed to replace m-dashes as well, thanks to your tip.

[j-lj.livejournal.com]

In Word 2002.

In the Tools menu select Options.

In the Options box, go to the View tab.

In the Formatting marks section of the View select Paragraph marks or All.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that tip. It's enabled me to see that Dragon is inserting 2 paragraph marks when I ask for a new paragraph.

[megamole.livejournal.com]

Find/Replace -> Special Characters -> ^p^p by ^p .

Word would be so much easier if it were EditPlus and did reg-exps...

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

That did it.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

I could have told you that!

Oh, and if you get spurious line feeds (when you do the "show paragraph marks" thing on the tool bar, they look like a "down and across to the left arrow, like on the big return key on most keyboards, rather than the big P sign of a paragraph mark) then use ^l (that's an L) instead.

RegExps are really difficult for people to use who aren't computer experts, Word tries to be helpful (and usually fails!)

Word - carriage return field codes

[taverymate.livejournal.com]

If they used the standard formatting, then you'd look for what Word calls a paragraph mark which is identified by ^p in field codes for find/replace - and it is case sensitive.

Word automatically ends each paragraph with a paragraph mark, so if you have a single blank line between paragraphs and you show formatting (you can do this by clicking on the paragraph icon on your toolbar), you'll see that you have a paragraph mark at the end of the paragrah, then another paragraph mark on the blank line.

That means if you want to replace TWO blank lines between paragraphs with ONE blank line, you need to search and replace ^p^p^p with ^p^p

If you want to remove ONE blank line between paragraphs and have no space (assuming you are using paragraph indents for readability instead), then you need to search and replace ^p^p with ^p

[dougs.livejournal.com]

You go edit-find or edit-replace in the usual way.

Hit the "More" button, and then the "Special" button, and then you can choose either "paragraph mark" or "manual line break" depending on which carriage return you need to find. Alternatively you can just type "^p" or "^l" (the ^ is shift-six) -- so you can replace "^p^p" with "^p" throughout.

[dougs.livejournal.com]

If you later want to re-format it with extra gaps between the paragraphs, you're better doing that by playing with styles rather than inserting extra breaks -- you can go format-styles and then modify the "normal" style by saying there's an extra space after the paragraph, but the way you do this is different in different versions of Word. Similarly you can play with line spacing.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I've figured out line spacing (eventually), but styles are currently a closed book. I'm hoping to get to serious grips with Word before too long, but I've just started teaching myself Excell (using an online training course), so I suspect that will keep me busy for a while.

I'm treasurer for Redemption next time, so I decided Excel took priority.

However, I need to learn word properly as I'm hoping to get more writing done.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

If you want a Word or Excel lesson sometime, we could give it a go and you could find out whether my teaching style suits your learning style!

I use styles everyday (I'm a Senior Technical Author at work)

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I'll bear that in mind if I get stuck on styles. (currently, I haven't a clue, and I know I need to know them.)

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Good boy!