Here you’ll see any number of different symbols and characters that you can find and replace including the Paragraph Mark. To remove hard returns from a text file, pick the Special option. This gives you the option to be able to refine how you find and replace. From the Find and Replace dialog box, pick More. But there’s more to this feature than simply looking for text and replacing it with something else. You’ve probably used these before to find text, perhaps punctuation, and replace it with something else. You can also use the following keyboard shortcuts: To begin, you’ll locate the Find and Replace commands on the right-hand side of the Home tab.
If you created placeholders for the paragraph marks you want to keep, reverse the steps you used for Step 3 to put back the paragraph marks you want to retain in the document.Depending on your document, replace the paragraph marks with a space or nothing at all. Choose Paragraph Mark from the options under Special. Find and replace remaining hard returns using the More > Special from the Find and Replace dialog box.As needed, replace multiple hard returns you want to keep with a placeholder.Save the original document with a new name.
The basic process to remove hard returns or paragraph marks as detailed below is: And that is to use the Find and Replace commands. However, there is a much easier approach to remove hard returns. Although it can be quite a time-consuming process, we could manually edit the text to delete the extra hard returns, add a space, or punctuation if necessary, and continue cleaning up the document in this way.