Another ^public service message

Much as some local typists seem addicted to the deplorable habit of hitting the space bar countless times when the Tab key is better suited to the job, I frequently see documents in which the Enter key has been pushed at the end of each line. To be fair, this can also happen when the text has been cut and pasted from another source, but sometimes it occurs through sheer lack of sense. If this has happened to you, you know what a pain it is to go through a long document manually and delete all these extra carriage returns.

In the spirit of the Shift+F3 trick I shared a while back, here is a simple way of fixing this automatically in Microsoft Word using the Find and Replace command (Ctrl+H):

0. Hit the Show/Hide Paragraph button on your toolbar (it looks like this: ¶) to reveal all carriage returns. Or go to Tools > Options and make sure there's a check mark beside "Paragraph marks" in the "Formatting marks" section. This is step zero because I always have the paragraph marks showing. It's not necessary, but it helps.

1. Find and replace " " with " ". That is, replace all the double spaces with single spaces. Repeat until all the double spaces are gone. This is the first thing I do with all documents.

2. Find and replace " ^p" to "^p". This deletes any extra space before a carriage return. Make sure the "p" is lower-case.

3. Find and replace "^p" with " ". This replaces each carriage return with a space.

4. If you wish to separate each paragraph with a blank line, find and replace " " with "^p^p". If you wish to mark each new paragraph with a tab, find and replace " " with "^p^t".

I make no guarantee that your document will be perfect at this point, but it should be looking much better than it was.