Word 2016, autoformat - the text does not always reformat.

So I have word set up to review a block of text and most of those are sentences consisting of 4-5-6 lines of text or short phrases that I want to auto format to my wider page space.

The auto return is wider and the individual lines of text have hard returns at the end. these are RTF files.

What I am having problems with is, when I highlight the entire block of text and use autoformat and then click okay, sometimes the text will reformat (in review) but other times it will do nothing at all as if each line of text has some code blocking the autoformat from deleting the hard return at the end of the line.

It's almost like word sees the end of each line as the end of a sentence or paragraph, but there is no period there.

Is there any setting that will correct this?

I have tried all the check boxes under autoformat and nothing helps for those problem blocks of text.

See http://word.mvps.org/faqs/formatting/CleanWebText.htm.

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Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

It's not pasted text.

It's my text that I have broken down into smaller lines for editing. IE it was in that format before. In the same file.

IE I hard return to break the sentence apart into smaller chunks, then use autoformat to put it back together. I may have 2 broken apart long sentences one below the other. One will autoformat correctly but not on the other.

If I reveal hidden codes, they look identical with only hard returns at the end of each short line.

How the text was created doesn't matter. The techniques in the article discuss how to use Find & Replace to get rid of "too short" lines. Of course, you don't want to end up with an entire document which consists of a single paragraph... If there is no pattern you may have to reformat the text manually, by deleting paragraph marks one by one.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

IMHO the macro in the Cleaning up Text Pasted from Websites, E-mails, PDFs etc. 'Sticky' thread at the top of this forum does a better job!


tammons: It's not clear what you're expecting AutoFormat to do here. If you've broken your text flow by inserting paragraph breaks and/or line breaks, nothing AutoFormat can do will undo it. Whatever AutoFormat can do may also be limited by what Styles are applied to the text and what AutoFormat options you're using.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

No thats not it.

I wrote text in word 2016, RTF format, in full sentences.

Then I broke them up into lyrical fragments to edit.

The fragments are only separated by a single return.

At the end, after editing I want to strip the returns from the sentence with autoformat.

Will try the macro.

AutoFormat has never been able to do that.

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

I missed that one completely. :-(

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional