Trying to fix strange paragraph problem

Copper Contributor

Hi,

This is maybe a long shot, and I realize it. But it's been driving me nuts, so the question is at least worth asking! :) I have a long document that was created LONG ago in a different word processing program (no idea which one it even was.) It was transferred to a Word doc years ago. Whenever I've tried to open it, the same problem comes up. Every line was somehow automatically cut in half. The paragraph mark automatically ended up at the end of each shortened line. Kind of like this:

The quick

brown fox

jumped over

the lazy dog.

When it was originally written as:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

 

I have never been able to find a way to fix this except by going through it and manually taking out each one of the paragraph marks that is at the end of a shortened line. The document was the manuscript of a book, and it's over 100,000 words long. It just isn't going to happen. While it may be hopeless, I REALLY want to find out if there's any other way of fixing this problem and getting rid of only the paragraph marks that aren't supposed to be there AND that automatically showed up back when this document was originally transferred from the mystery format to Word. It's Word 365 and Windows 10. Does anybody have ANY ideas here? Thanks in advance! :)

5 Replies

@Stefan_Blomthanks! I tried all of the options, and the Autoformat one is the closest to actually working. It KIND of works-- often I have to go paragraph by paragraph. I think I need to just accept that this is going to be a huge project that will take a long time.

@Cdaniel889 

 

Thanks for the follow-up.

 

Yes, "fixing" a document with undesired paragraph and line breaks will often require quite a lot of manual work. As you have seen, you can combine it with AutoFormat and perhaps also Find & Replace. 

And it's over 100,000 words!! But I'm working on it a little bit every day.... it's like eating an elephant. One bite at a time. :)

@Cdaniel889 

 

It seems as if you are experiencing progress, at least. :)  Good luck.