MS-Word adding & removing carriage returns Tips by Donald Burleson

When editing in Microsoft Word (MS-Word) you often need to add or remove line-breaks (carriage returns) from your document.

Inside your word document, a paragraph is represented by the - symbol (which looks like a reverse P).  The problem is that you cannot specify this carriage return symbol on a replace command.

It's not necessary to use a Macro for changing line breaks because MS Word allows the "carat p" symbol ^p (carat is the <shift> 6 key) to represent a carriage return in an MS-Word replace command.

For example, if you want to put each sentence on a new line, you can use find ---> replace and enter:
 

find:	.
replace:	.^p

Conversely, if you are pasting-in a web page into an MS-Word document you may want to remove the double line breaks and you can use the same replace techniques to replace double carriage returns with a single carriage return:
 

find:	^p^p
replace:	^p

Reader Comments:

It is possible to replace ^p with a space

1. By first replacing ^p with 2 characters not in the text separated by a space.  Eg ?? ??, and then

2. Removing all the - characters.