One of the time consuming tasks in Microsoft Word is cleaning up text from
outside sources,
especially when the document has extra hard returns you want to delete.
These documents include text copied from a pdf, transcripts from a Zoom meeting,
text from YouTube or other services,
and documents received from colleagues and clients who might be using other
programs.
The challenge is you're wasting too much time manually cleaning up these files.
I'm Dawn Bjork, a Microsoft Certified Word Expert.
Let's look at how easy it is to remove extra hard returns from a Microsoft Word
document or text file. In this document,
it's pretty easy to see where the hard returns are coming in.
That is the text is not wrapping with what's called a soft return.
We have hard returns at the end here and so we could come into the text and hit
the delete key, add a space or punctuation if necessary,
and continue cleaning up the document in this way.
That is taking up too much time.
The first thing we also want to do is to get more information and we do this by
working with Show/Hide. This is in the Home tab in the Paragraph group,
you'll find this paragraph mark,
turn that on and you will now be displaying non-printed characters,
sometimes referred to as hidden characters.
So now we can see how there are hard returns at the ends of these lines and it's
breaking the text in awkward places. This can easily be fixed.
The key is to use the Replace command.
You'll find this on the right hand side of the Home tab.
Click Replace or use our [Ctrl]+H keyboard shortcut.
You've probably used this before to find text, perhaps punctuation,
and then replace it with something else.
But there's more to this feature than simply looking for text and replacing it
with something else. Let's go into More.
Now this gives you the option to be able to refine how you Find and Replace.
Our focus right now is on the Special button.
We go to Special.
Here you'll see any number of different symbols and characters at you can Find
and Replace. So for instance, the paragraph mark.
We want to find where the paragraph mark occurs and replace it either with the
space or sometimes with nothing if there already is a space in place.
Now if you do this on a regular basis,
then the other way to create this is by using the caret (^) symbol.
You'll find that at the top of your keyboard above the number 6 key.
So caret (^) + P.
Either way.
And then at this point we could put in what we want to replace.
But there's another thing to look out for because we actually do want to have
some hard returns for paragraph marks at the end of the true paragraphs.
And so you'll notice in this document here there are two hard returns where that
occurs. One of the options here is we don't necessarily want to look for all the
paragraph marks and replace them because now we're creating another place where
we're going to have to spend our time cleaning up the document. In this case,
what we'll do is we'll look for any occurrence where there's two hard returns
and this is going to be custom depending upon what your document looks like.
And I'm going to replace it with placeholders.
Now this could essentially be anything that would not normally appear in the
documents, so it could be a couple of asterisks,
three exclamation marks,
just something that can be a placeholder that you're going to come back to.
In this case, we'll replace it. Now if you're not too confident yet,
you can replace them individually. Find Next and Replace.
I'm going to do a Replace All.
Good idea though that you make a copy of this before you start working on
cleaning it up.
Now we have those placeholders for where we actually do want to see a paragraph
mark. Next,
come back into our text and let's look for and find those and replace with
blank. We might have a little bit of cleanup,
but for most of them in the document you might see where many of them proceed or
have a space in front of them so we don't have to put in an extra space.
Once again, we can go one at a time.
I'm going to be real brave or maybe not so brave,
not so smart and replace them all.
So what has happened now is Word has gone through and made 112 replacements.
That would be 112 times that you would be manually deleting that hard return,
but just by knowing about this simple, although not obvious feature,
you can now let Word do it for you.
We're getting really close to having this be much more useful to us.
The last piece here, let's reset those hard returns.
I look for those two asterisks. Remember,
the asterisks don't really have any specific meaning there and I'm going to
replace it with, I'll put in two hard returns. And in this case, I'm typing this,
but we could find those once again under Special.
Definitely check these out because you'll see that there's a lot of things that
you can be looking for that might not be something you could figure out how to
reference them. I'm looking for those asterisks,
replacing it with two hard returns.
A few clicks, a few fixes.
You now have a document that probably only needs a little bit of cleanup,
such as adding spaces where some of these words are blended together.
Now it only takes you a few minutes and saves time so that you can focus on
what's more important to you. Hope that's helpful.
You can find more tips at https://TheSoftwarePro.com/Word and please subscribe
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This is Dawn Bjork, The Software Pro. Thanks for watching.