Is there an easy way to change the line formatting of copy-pasted material in Microsoft Word?

I wonder if you need a conversion application.

What a great question! I haaaate doing that! and I have no idea how to fix it.

The only thing I can even suggest is to copy the text into a notepad document first, then to Word. A lot of the time notepad removes all formatting, including the stupid line ending things. But sometimes not.

Good luck. I’ll be following this thread.

The screenshot is helpful. I think your problem is actually the rest of the text, the shortlines are prematurely ‘returned’ to the next line.

Try using Find/Replace, look for ^l (a caret and lower-case L, which means an actual line break to Word) then replace with nothing. If ^l doesn’t work, try ^p which means paragraph end. You might need to work on selected sections too.

That should reduce all of the short lines to a real paragraph. You can then use the normal paragraphing controls.

I used this site as a reference, but changed the instructions for your case.

Also if you’d like to put the Word file somewhere I’d be happy to see what works on that directly too.

Seriously, the replace function is your friend.

1. Under edit, select replace.
2. Click the blue drop down menu bar on the left.
3. For “find what”, select the “special” drop down menu bar, and select paragraph mark.
4. Then, in “replace with”, just hit the space bar once to create a single space (or a comma, or semicolon, or whatever you want), but I use a space.
5. Click replace all if you have the stones, or, find next and replace them one at a time if you don’t.

Done and done.

Note: I love the replace function. I frequently type the words Mycobacterium tuberculosis (I work with it) into documents. But, species are supposed to be italicized, so it is great to just type along, and then at the end, replace all to Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

I have no solution to this problem but if you EVER want to talk about action potentials, I’m your girl!!!!!!

@artificialard – thank you for searching for this and trying to help me! lurve for the attempt I tried that method but it didn’t work :(

@La_chica_gomela – Yesss it has been bothering me for a while so I finally decided to ask Fluther.

@everyone – I emailed shilolo the file and he used his above described method to solve it. And it worked! Yay! Thanks shilolo!

@nikipedia – hahhaha i’ll probably take you up on that sooner than you expect :P