Hello, this is Cristi. Today, I want to show you a cool trick in Microsoft Word on cleaning up
your text that you bring from external sources and it's broken down into weird lines and paragraphs,
and it doesn't keep sentences together. So this is typically happening when
you bring texts in from for example, audio transcripts or YouTube or video transcripts.
Let me show you an example here. This text is in Notepad and it is a transcript of a video. And,
you know, when you save that as a text from like a YouTube or some other transcription tool,
it could be like this with line breaks where they shouldn't be line breaks because that's
when the timestamp tells the video that it's a new phrase, so then the transcription software breaks
it down like this into different paragraphs. But actually if you look at this, this is actually a
single sentence. So it should be really up here instead of down there like that. So when you
want to take this text, maybe to create a blog post or another document from the transcript,
it's a lot of work to actually go at the end of every line, put these paragraphs together
like this, right? Or this could happen also when you bring texts in from for example,
a PDF file because a PDF files could have columns and if you bring texts in, it will break it there,
it won't flow the text like it should do. So let me show you how I do this in Word.
First of all, I'm going to select all of the texts in this Notepad and copy
it. And go to Word here and just paste it. Okay. As you've seen it,
it creates all these many, many line breaks and everything.
So first of all, I want to clean this up. So let's do this very easily using
two Search and Replaces. So if you go to the top strip here on the Home tab,
click Replace, or Control H to bring in the replace tool. And what we're looking for
is for the paragraph mark with this is what it's called is paragraph mark. So obviously,
you know, you cannot know how to do that, but if you click More here, it will open this Format and
Special menu here. So for the Special, we will place the cursor in the Find What line here,
and we will choose Special, and we will look for the Paragraph mark, which is the first tool here,
the first option. So this will find all of the paragraph marks as you see, let's see. And it
finds all of them starting with the top. So as you can see, it identifies correctly all of the
paragraph marks. Depending on how your texts came in, you could be doing line breaks also.
So you need to figure out which special character this is, but it's most likely the paragraph mark.
So what we want to do with this is replace it with space. So clicking the Replace with clicks, tap,
tap on the space, key to make a space. And all you do is just Replace all.
Now you can see, I would have had to make 532 replacements manually,
which would have been quite a long time.
So this is the first step. We are not yet finished because all of my text is now one big paragraph of
text, which is again, not very helpful. So, what I can do, of course, Word doesn't know where I want
my text to break, obviously, because it doesn't understand the text, what it means and how it is
supposed to be divided, but at least I can bring it back down to individual sentences on one line
so that I can at least browse it easier, to read it easier to scan it and break it apart myself.
So the way to do that is, we will do another Search and Replace. And depending on how your
text is, I'm hoping you have dots for the full stop for the end of the sentences. So
we will be looking for the full stop and space and replacing that with line break
or a paragraph break. So we will go to the Replace with go to Special, and then we will
do a Paragraph mark like that. Okay. Let's do Replace all. There you go, 141 replacements,
141 sentences in my document. So here we are, as you can see, we have divided this. Now,
if you've made a mistake, like I've just done now where I've added a space, I've left that
space in there. All I can do is just undo here real quick, and Replace again, make sure that
I don't have a space before the paragraph mark and Replace all again. And here we go.
So that is it for today. I hope this was useful to you. If you'd like my tutorials,
please subscribe to my channel. See you next time.