Hello folks...

Have a weird one for you, I hope you can help me out.

Mac user, Office 2011.

Trying to find all incorrectly assigned smart quotes. FOR EXAMPLE:

“Steve, why do you say that? “ Donna's eyes closed as she asked him.

or:

John Henry informs us that:

“There was no examples of pollination of apple species before 1811 “(Original Apples of the Colonies, 1932)

Sometimes I get documents to edit that have a space between the last letter in a quotation and the quotation mark. This makes Word think that it needs to close the quotation with an opening curly quotation mark.



As you can imagine, finding these in an inconsistent 600 page document is harrowing, indeed. I don't mind making the changes myself, but I really need Word to find them for me as not all sentences are structured this way and I am clearly missing some as I go through page by page (not to mention that it is taking hours).

Any advice folks?

In a COPY of your document...
Search for [space]"[space] and replace with "[space]

That will help with some of the misplaced quotation marks (the first example) but not those which are followed by some character other than a space. I can think of no way to fix that (other than sending it back to the source).

You could change all of the marks to straight rather than curly, but that doesn't really address the problem.

You might also be interested in: http://windowssecrets.com/forums/sho...l=1#post793859

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks to all. I appreciate your input and assistance.

Have a great rest of your week!