I have thousands of dictionary entries in a Word doc each separated as a paragraph. I now want to separate each entry with a horizontal rule. Can I automate this with Find & Replace?



Find:^p (paragraph mark)
Replace:

What do I need to replace with to create a horizontal rule? The HTML for the horizontal rule is:

If you use separate styles for terms and definitions (the way HTML has the dt/dd pair, for instance) you can include the rule in the style definition for the terms.

Given that you include html in your post, you could also use CSS to apply styling there – as long as you've applied styles in the Word file for the html conversion to pick up.

Are you saying that a horizontal rule can be applied with styles?

What I ended up doing was:

1. save docx file as filtered html
2. open html file with notepad, copy contents into a new docx file
3. Find:</p>, Replace:</p><hr>
4. copy contents into new notepad file and save with html extension
5. open html file with Word and save as docx file

This did the job.

Glad you found a solution. For future reference, you can apply a top or bottom border as a part of a paragraph style. This acts as a horizontal rule. It will stretch from left indent to right indent (usually the page or column margins). By clicking on "More" in the Replace dialog, you can go to Format > Style to use the Replace function to replace or apply styles in a document. Styles are very much worth learning if you are using Word much at all.

Understanding Styles in Microsoft Word

After your suggestion I tried doing it with a paragraph style. Worked well.

Thanks

You are welcome.