Can I fix this in Word 2010?

[lostsoul62]

I get an email like this
>>
Original etc etc
>>
>>
>>The
>>
>>Cow
>>
>>
>>Jump
>over
>>
>>
the
>>moon

How can I fix a messed up email like this before I send it on to the next person so they don't think I'm stupid. In the pass I took 5 or 10 minutes and hand did this but now I have a long one. So I will copy and paste this email to Word fix it and then copy it back to be email to the next person.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

You might have some success with the editing function in Word 2010, specifically "find and replace".

Ask it to find >

Don't enter anything in the "replace" box.

I just tried it, using this as a sample:

te>st>>er

The result was "tester". It removed all of the >.

 

[lostsoul62]

The problem is I have about a thousand words which have one word on every other line. I'm sure you have seen this before. I went to the line spacing options and chose 1.0 which is supposed to get rid of empty lines which it didn't. Any suggestions?

 

[ignatzatsonic]

No further suggestions other than just fiddling with the options in Word to see what you can come up with.

It may be that all you can do quickly is get rid of the > and that you would have to do the rest of it by hand.

You might try entering a blank space (hit the spacebar one time) in the "replace with" box to see what that gets you.

 

[koolkat77]

I've had this issue in outlook and i guess theres no fix to it. because it depends on what format the sender sent you the message on or what program they are using and to my knowledge this happens when composing message directly from a pop account which has no features of formatting text changing fonts etc.

hope this helps but please wait for more inputs as i could be wrong.

 

[lostsoul62]

Thank you KoolKat77. I put this in Word and took out the > I'm trying to solve this problem bit by bit.
Is there any way to delete an empty line? I have a thousand words one on every other line so is there any way to delete them so my words will be together and not space apart? I'm wondering if I can put this in a different format to work with?

 

[koolkat77]

like i said, its the fault of the format which the email was sent to you in the first place. you may create a new email instead which will be default html, copy and paste the rest of the message and remove the > as you like. If you want to check what format the message was sent in open the message hit reply, and click on "format text" there you'll be able to see whether it is HTML text, Plain Text or Rich Text.

HTH
KK

 

[gladson1976]

Hi,

You will have to use an editor that understands regular expressions for replacing the new lines

1. Goto Online Regular Expression Search and Replace Text Editor
2. Paste the text in the big text area
3. Select g=Global/all and m=Multi-line text checkboxes
4. Type '>' (without quotes) in the Find Regexp textbox and nothing in the Replacement textbox and click on RegexReplace
5. Next, type '\n' (without quotes) in the Find Regexp textbox and a SPACE in the Replacement textbox and click on RegexReplace again.
6. Everything will be in one line.
7. To remove extra spaces between words, type two SPACEs in the Find Regexp textbox and one SPACE in the Replacement textbox and click on RegexReplace again. Click on RegexReplace as much as required.
8. Done

 

[UsernameIssues]

Edit: Doh! It took me so long to compose my post below that I did not see gladson1976's post just above. Nice online tool.

...I went to the line spacing options and chose 1.0 which is supposed to get rid of empty lines which it didn't. Any suggestions?

The line spacing setting only sets the spacing between lines.
A line with no text showing is still a line.
Each "empty" line probably has a soft return or a hard return.
If you want to see these returns, please read this.

...Is there any way to delete an empty line?...

Yes - but you really do not want to delete them. They are your best chance of getting a single space between each word.

Let's start from the original copied/pasted text:
1) "Replace All" of the hard or soft returns with one space
2) "Replace All" of the > characters with nothing
3) "Replace All" of two spaces with one space
4) Repeat step 3 until you have one space between each word

Once you have toggled the paragraph symbol/icon/button to let you see the hard or soft returns, then you will probably see one of two things (depending on the e-mail reader that this is coming out of)

Hard returns



Or soft returns










For the image below...
...click in the field named "Find What"
...click on the button named "Special"
...select Paragraph Mark as shown
(for soft returns - select Manual Line Break)
Then click in the field named "Replace with" and type one space.




This last screen shot just shows where the Paragraph Marks turned into spaces after each word or after each >>.



All of the screen shots above were for step one - let me know if you cannot figure out how to do the other steps. For step two, you will want to delete the space in the field named "Replace with".

[It is actually a bit better to do step 2 before step 1, but I wanted to show you that last screen shot above. If you do step 2 first, the field named "Replace with" may already be empty. Then the remaining steps just leave one space in the field named "Replace with".]

Next you should learn how to record a macro, then all of these steps can be done with just two clicks. If you opt to record this as a macro, then start the recording before you paste the info into Word (while the info is in the Windows clipboard) and end the recording after you have copied all of the corrected text back to the clipboard [Ctrl-A Ctrl-C]. Edit: or you can use [Ctrl-A Ctrl-X] which will clear the Word document so that it is ready for your next use of the macro.

Then to use the macro, you can copy the bad text to the clipboard, click to run the Word macro, paste the corrected text in to an e-mail for any tiny manual clean up.

BTW, It only takes one click to start a macro in Office 2003, but they just had to make Office 2007/2010 better - twice as many clicks :-(

 

[gladson1976]

Never thought of trying it out in Word itself :shock: Thought Word doesn't have this feature.
Learnt something new today