How to remove and replace characters in a document, including those originally intended for setting layout and formatting.
Last updated on 2020-07-28 by David Wallis.
Preface
Kutools for Word provides the most convenient way to remove all pictures from the document. It can remove all pictures from the whole document or all pictures from the selected part of the document. Kutools for Word: with more than 100 handy Word add-ins, free to try with no limitation in 60 days. Remove pictures from a range: 1. About technical and heavy words, I actually use them as sparingly as possible. Anyone can throw in a buzzword, the real art is in communicating with people in a way they understand. Sometimes you have an audience who needs that buzzword because it's a shortcut to a wealth of understood information about a process or topic.
Re-formatting to improve layout of a document by adjusting 'white space' is a chore. That includes replacing characters used by the author instead of properly applying suitable formatting. But so often it's necessary to make such changes in order to improve the appearance and serviceability of existing documents, particularly those knocked up without much thought and care, or without full understanding of the proper use of Word.
I receive as attachments to emails contracts, NDAs and other documents that require I fill them in and email them back. The majority of these attachments are Word documents, in which, when I try to input, the formatting breaks down and I have to spend time tidying things up.
Here's the final section of an NDA, as a typical example:
This is what happens when I fill in this section:
Artist Dan Duffy offers handmade word art prints & decor for your favorite cities, sports teams, historical & pop culture figures. Within their strong fleet of removal vehicles, the articulated lorry is the back bone of the fleet.They travel all over Europe delivering client belongings. Here is a little information about the articulated truck The maximum gross load weight is 44tonnes including truck, fuel and load. All of this weight can be spread over six axles.
The deterioration of the layout is the result of poor construction, part of which is due to the use of repeated underscore characters; and to inconsistent tab settings. We can see the tabs in the original when the non-printing characters are displayed:
Also exposed are the empty paragraphs, ¶, used to introduce white space between lines of text. I guess the NDA was originally intended for printing out and manual completion by the recipient. A pity the author did not rework it for use as a editable document: in its current form the document is likely to create an unfavourable impression im the mind of any recipient.
On this web page I'm focusing on removal of unwanted formatting and characters. If there's enough interest, I'll add pages on techniques for restructuring documents like the one illustrated above, and on creating properly structured documents afresh.
Removing Repeated Characters
Unfortunately, some authors type the same character repeatedly in order to position text. In this example spaces — from the keyboard's space bar and appearing as mid-line dots — have been used:
Consider replacing the all the space characters in each group of them with a tab to achieve this:
Adjusting the position of tabs will restore the layout:
One way of achieving the replacement by applying Word's Find and Replace, using codes ^w for Find what and ^t for Replace with:
Exercise caution over which Replace button you click: Replace All will run its magic across the document as a whole, possibly causing unanticipated results.
Where you find the codes like ^w and ^t, I explain in the next section.
Character Search Codes
You'll find the characters you can search for and replace in Find and Replace when you click more >> and then Special:
Removal and Replacement of Characters and Combinations of Characters
You use Find and Replace to replace characters or remove them altogether. In the following examples don't include the quotation marks, ' and ', in your Find and Replace values.
To replace each underscore character with two spaces:
How to authorize a computer for itunes mac. Find = '_'
Replace = ' '
To replace a full stop followed by two spaces with a full stop followed by a single space:
Find = '. '
Replace = '. '
Empty paragraphs intended to produce white space between paragraphs of text, appear in the document as one paragraph marker, ¶, immediately followed by another, like this:
To get rid of an empty paragraph, replace two paragraph markers with one:
Find = '^p^p'
Replace = '^p'
Space Between Paragraphs
Despite it being over 30 years since Microsoft launched Word, you'll still come across many documents in which an empty paragraph is used to create space between paragraphs.
In the previous section I explained how to remove empty paragraphs. If you've gone to the trouble of doing this, but want to restore the space, then please don't be tempted to return to that bad old habit of two carriage returns. Instead have a read of Using Styles to Control White Space Between Headings and Paragraphs.
Keyboard Shortcuts
These are shortcuts that you might find useful:
Ctrl+H opens the Search and Replace dialog box.
F5 opens the Search and Replace dialog box with its Go To tab active.
Ctrl+Alt+Z toggles around the four previous place in which you edited the document.
Ctrl+Click with the insertion pointer anywhere in a sentence to select that sentence.
Double Click anywhere in a word to select that word.
Triple Click anywhere in a paragraph to select that paragraph.
Shift+End extends your selection to the end of the line.
Shift+Home extends your selection to the beginning of the line.
Ctrl+UpArrow moves to the beginning of the current paragraph and subsequently to the beginning of the previous paragraph.
2.2 linear and nonlinear relationsmr. mac's page examples. Ctrl+DownArrow moves to the beginning of the next paragraph.
Ctrl+Delete (A) when insertion pointer is within a word, deletes the rest of that word; (B) if a word is selected, then deletes that word, just as would Delete on its own; (C) when insertion pointer is between words, deletes the next word.
Ctrl+Backspace (A) when insertion pointer is within a word, deletes the characters in that word leading up to the pointer's position; (B) when insertion pointer is between words, deletes the word to the left.
Your Support for dmw TIPS
Please support this website by making a donation to help keep it free of advertising and to help towards cost of time spent adding new content.
To make a contribution by PayPal in GBP (£ sterling) —
To make a contribution by PayPal in USD ($ US) —
If you'd like an invoice to account for your donation, let me know how much you're donating —
Thanks, in anticipation.
In this article, we will learn how to remove unwanted characters in Excel.
Sometimes you get uncleaned data set in excel & I don't want you being banging your head on wall to clean the data set.
In simple words, Excel lets you clean unwanted characters using SUBSTITUTE function .
Syntax to clean unwanted characters
'' : empty string
Let's use this function on some of the uncleaned values shown below.
Let's understand this one by one:
1st case:
When you need to remove just the spaces from the data set. Use the single space as remove_char in the formula
Formula
Explanation:
This formula extracts every single space in the cell value and replaces it with an empty string.
As you can see the first value is cleaned.
Second Case:
When you know a specific character to remove from the cell value, just use that character as remove_char in the formula
Use the formula
As you can see the value is cleaned.
Third Case:
When you wish to remove the character by using its code. This can help you in removing case sensitive character.
Just use the char(code) in place of remove_char. To know the code of the character uses the function shown below.
Use the formula to remove the character
As you can see the value is cleaned.
Final Case:
When you wish to remove the character which comes at the first position in the text. You need to grab the code of the character using the LEFT & CODE function.
Use the formula
The Art Of Removing Words For Good
Explanation:
LEFT(A5) grabs the single space code in the formula using LEFT & CODE function and giving as input to char function to replace it with an empty string.
As you can see the value is cleaned in both the cases whether it is single space or any other character.
I hope you understood how to remove unwanted characters from the text using SUBSTITUTE function in Excel. Explore more articles on Excel TEXT function here. Please feel free to state your query or feedback for the above article.
Related Articles:
The Art Of Removing Words Letters
Popular Articles:
