I have a 200+ page word document that was originally copied from a pdf and lost its paragraph formating - so for example:

instead of:

In Western culture dessert is a course that typically comes at the end of a meal, usually consisting of sweet food. The word comes from the French language as dessert and this from Old French desservir, "to clear the table" and "to serve." Common desserts inc...

it looks something like:

In Western culture dessert is a course
that typically comes at the end of a meal, usually
consisting of sweet food. The
word comes from the French language as dessert


and this from Old French desservir, "to clear the table"
and "to serve." Common desserts inc...


Is there a way I can recreate normal paragraphs from that text without pressing delete, space after every single line?

Thank you!

Hi pixelprincess,

Try the following sequence of four wildcard Find/Replace operations:
Find = ([!^13])([^13])([!^13])
Replace = \1 \3

Find = ([ ])[ ]{1,}
Replace = \1

Find = [^13]{2,}
Replace = ^p

Find = [ ^13]
Replace = ^p

To do a wildcard Find/Replace, you click on the Find/Replace dialog's 'More' button and choose 'use wildcards'.

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

That is amazing - thank you! Those find/replace commands are great.

Would you (or anyone else) happen to know how i can now force the document to indent the first line of every paragraph (or block of text)?

Also, after doing that find/replace seqeunce I have many (about 15 per page) words where the last letter is one space after the word, for example:

"The quic k brown fox jumps over the laz y dog"

I am going through this in spell check, but would there be a faster way? (It's going to take me a while to get the wildcards down so that I could write my own...)

Again, thank you!

Hi pixelprincess,

For the first problem, I'd suggest selecting the first 'problem' paragraph and defining a paragraph Style, with a first-line indent of whatever you require (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S then click the 'New Style' button at the bottom of the pop-up, followed by Format|Paragraph gets you there). You'll need to give the Style a new name (eg 'Main'). Alternatively, you might prefer to chhose the 'Body Text' Style and modify that. Then you can select the ranges you want to apply the Style to and simply hit F4 to repeat the Style as often as you want, or you can select the Style name from Word's Style list (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S).

For the second problem, perhaps another wildcard Find/Replace, where:
Find = [ ]([a-z][ ])
Replace = \1

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