Wildcards in Find/Replace Formatting

Topic

New Reply

I often want to remove space before paragraphs using find/replace. I know how to do this using the format/paragraph feature in find/replace.

However, this requires that you know the amount of space you want to remove so that you can put it in the “Before” box on the Paragraph screen. Does anybody know how to put a wildcard in this box so you can do find/replace operations of the form “Find any amount of space before a paragraph and replace it with 0”? (This situation happens often if you dump a file from Access to Word–Access likes to put varying amounts of space around page breaks, for example, and when you delete the page breaks, you can get an ugly looking file.)

Don.

Reply | Quote

Replies

Hi Tom:
NOT using wildcards:
Find: ^w
Replace: one space or whatever you want

Hope this helps.

Reply | Quote

Phil:

No this isn’t what I meant. I am referring to doing find/replaces on the FORMAT, not on the text itself. On the Find Paragraph window, I want to put a wildcard in the Space Before box to mean “any value” so that I can replace it with 0 space.

Hope this clarifies it.

Don.

Reply | Quote

Hi Don:

I may still not understand your question. To replace a format, you leave the Find box blank. Perhaps you could either attach a small file showing what you want, or type an example.

Reply | Quote

in Microsoft word how do you permanently delete “remove space before paragraphs”

Reply | Quote

Aah! Now I see what he was after. Good call, BAM.

Reply | Quote

Thanks to BAM! That’s exactly what I was asking. I didn’t realize that you could leave the formatting fields blank in the find part. I also didn’t know that you had to put the ^p in the find box.

This will save me a lot of headache, so thanks again!

Don.

Reply | Quote