MS Word: Find & Replace tricks

I am sure that you 'recycle' text from the internet regularly. I am a cut and paste queen - though I do try very hard to say where I got information from (honouring my sources).

So, if you are like me, sometimes when you cut and paste, you get a whole load of other formatting that comes with your cutting and pasting, which may not be removed using a text only paste.

That is where Find and Replace in Word comes in very handy.

But there are some technical things that you need to know in order to get the most out of Find & Replace.

You can replace paragraph breaks - hard returns in typing parlance - with by keying in caret and p (ie, "^p"). Do the same for tabs ("^t") and soft returns ("^l").

You can replace double spaces with single spaces, or replace hard returns with a single space to get rid of unwanted line breaks in text that you have imported from a pdf.

It makes life a lot easier.


Sam

And if you want to know how to set up for text only pasting, read this.