Those annoying empty boxes …

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I have some data that’s been imported into Word. Where there was a carriage return in the data, one of those empty box-like placeholders is inserted. Sort of looks like this [] (but a little wider).

How do I get rid of these boxes? These data’s in fields, so you can’t delete them. And what are they called anyway?

Thanks,

Mary

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Those are carriage returns without a linefeed. Its been a while since I had to do this, so I don’t remember exactly what I did. Two things come to mind:

1- Select Replace from the Edit menu. If you don’t have a button on the bottom of the dialog box that says Special, then you should have a button on the right side that says More. Click on that. Make sure the cursor is in the Find What box, then click on special and select Manual Line Break from the list that appears. Move the cursor to the Replace With box, again click on the Special button and select Paragraph Mark from the list. Click on Replace or Replace All.

2- Select one of those boxes and copy it. Go to the Edit/Replace dialog box and paste it into the Find What box (You will have to use Ctrl+V to do the paste). Then put a paragraph mark in the Replace With box and click on Replace button.

I am not sure if either of these will work if the text is in fields.

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Thanks. That is clearly what they are. Unfortunately, it looks like Find/Replace won’t work in fields.

But this process has taught me that fields don’t seem to like carriage returns. So, I have used a few bookmarks in the place of fields where that may be a problem.

All’s well now. Thanks again for the help.

Mary

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The contents of fields can be replaced. If you use Alt+F9 you can then use Edit>Replace. To replace Control codes, you need to enter the correct characters. For a linefeed the code is ^11. See TechNet Q95474

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There is an excellent Word document posted somewhere on this Board by Phil Rabichow which opens up the power of find and replace search engines in Word. Trouble is, I cannot find the link to it now.

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