Postformatting spaces between sentences using auto correct?

[Chunk]

Hi,



I'm new here and seeking some advice. I'm currently editing a document in which the senctences have all been written without the usual space between them. For example;

Whenever one sentence ends and the next one begins there is no space between them.This is driving me crazy.Please help!

I've already sussed that this can be prevented in future by setting the grammar function of the auto correct tool to detect when this happens and insert a space. What I need now is a way for Word to check the entire document after the fact and make the necessary amendments.

I know this can be done using the spell checker but it requires that I sit patiently (not a stroing point of mine) and approve each proposed correction individually.

This would quite literally take me hours to achieve; I have already been at this an hour and so far have managed to process perhaps 27 pages out of 367!

Can anyone shed any light on an alternative method?

Any suggestions would be grealy appreciated.

Thanks.

[macropod]

Hi Chunk,

Try the following wildcard Find/Replace:
Find = ([a-z0-9][.,\!?:;])([A-Z])
Replace= \1 \2
This will find any lower-case letter or number followed by any of '.,!?:;' and an upper-case letter and insert a space after whichever of the '.,!?:;' is found.

[Chunk]

Hi macropod,

Thank you! That worked a treat and saved me buckets of time, over 7,500 replacements made in the blink of an eye!

There is one thing which is puzzling however; there are a number of occurances where the wildcard string you so helpfully provided failed to reconise what I believed to be covered by the search parameters. In these cases a lowercase character is followed by a ? and then immediately by an UPPERCASE character, in each case when part of a dialogue in between speech marks ". For example;

"How did you manage to finish the spell checking so quickly?I thought it was going to take you all day!"
"Some helpful soul on MSOffice Forums solved the problem for me!Now I can finish this tedious undertaking in the fraction of the time it would have taken me and put my valuable time to better use. The pub springs to mind, actually."

As far as I can see, the wildcard search parameters should have caught and replaced these by virtue of the middle part of the string, (where a lowercase character is followed by a ? and then by an UPPERCASE character) as in the highlighted section ([a-z0-9][.,\!?:;])([A-Z]).

Is there any reason why the find/replace isn't working under these conditions?

Thanks.

[macropod]

Hi Chunk,

That's a minor error in my Find expression; it should have been = ([a-z0-9][.,\!\?:;])([A-Z])

Running it again with the added '\' should fix things.

[Chunk]

Hi macropod,

Yep, that's done the trick, thanks

I've not been lazy, and have since been researching the wildcard find/replace tools. I'll confess I didn't even know that was a part of the feature in Word!

Now I'm armed with this bit of knowledge hopefully I can try to learn more about it to be come self sufficient; although you know what they say - a little knowledge is a dangerous thing!

Thanks for the help.