Is it because MS-Word Knows Best? (Word 2000 >)

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Loungers

OK when I find an article on the web that I would like to keep in my set of articles for future reference, I copy and paste the text into a MS-Word document, and then clean it up.

I am sure that there are more efficient ways, and I like to hear about them, but I also do enjoy cleaning up HTML coded text in MS-Word Plus I get to the article while doing so.

But what I don’t enjoy is when I go to remove the last paragraph mark, the ^P mark, the Inverted Bold P, the whatshamacallit thingy, I wish I could take a picture and paste it here, MS-Word reverts the last line of text to some Times New Roman font size 12, which is what I think I have set as default for my liking .

WHY DOES WORD DO THAT?

And how can I stop it?!

Thanks for any ideas.

Wassim
It should be legal to spam the spammers. Spam haters of the World, let

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Use Edit>Paste … Special Unformatted text.
The “backwards P” is a pilcrow (

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Use Edit>Paste … Special Unformatted text.
The “backwards P” is a pilcrow (

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Hi Wassim:
I interpreted your question a little differently than Doug did. Paste Special/Unformatted will paste the text in without any formatting & it will take on the style of the target paragraph. But if you’re trying to keep the styles that are on the web (rather than the default of TNR), then before you delete the paragraph mark in the last row, try this. First, make sure that you can see the pilcrows (show/hide on the formatting toolbar). Put the cursor in front of the last paragraph mark (the one after the end of your row) & press Delete.

Pressing delete in the row before & pressing backspace in the beginning of the next row are different. Don’t ask why.

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Hi Wassim:
I interpreted your question a little differently than Doug did. Paste Special/Unformatted will paste the text in without any formatting & it will take on the style of the target paragraph. But if you’re trying to keep the styles that are on the web (rather than the default of TNR), then before you delete the paragraph mark in the last row, try this. First, make sure that you can see the pilcrows (show/hide on the formatting toolbar). Put the cursor in front of the last paragraph mark (the one after the end of your row) & press Delete.

Pressing delete in the row before & pressing backspace in the beginning of the next row are different. Don’t ask why.

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In Word 2002, I can’t replicate that problem, assuming the last paragraph is empty and there is just an extra paragraph mark to be removed.

With direct formatting applied to the last text in a document, or with the next to last paragraph in a particular style, the formatting “sticks” whether I delete the first of the two paragraph marks or the second.

However, if I add a few characters (e.g., asdf) in the text of the last paragraph and delete the second-to-last paragraph mark plus that text (I assume even extra spaces could cause this), then the paragraph style of the second-to-last paragraph is lost, and, if the text of that paragraph was formatted solely by the style, the format of the text also changes. Again, though, any direct formatting remains.

Assuming you understand what I just said, then you can work around this behavior by clearing the contents of the last paragraph of the document separately from deleting the redundant paragraph marks that precede it.

Reply | Quote

In Word 2002, I can’t replicate that problem, assuming the last paragraph is empty and there is just an extra paragraph mark to be removed.

With direct formatting applied to the last text in a document, or with the next to last paragraph in a particular style, the formatting “sticks” whether I delete the first of the two paragraph marks or the second.

However, if I add a few characters (e.g., asdf) in the text of the last paragraph and delete the second-to-last paragraph mark plus that text (I assume even extra spaces could cause this), then the paragraph style of the second-to-last paragraph is lost, and, if the text of that paragraph was formatted solely by the style, the format of the text also changes. Again, though, any direct formatting remains.

Assuming you understand what I just said, then you can work around this behavior by clearing the contents of the last paragraph of the document separately from deleting the redundant paragraph marks that precede it.

Reply | Quote