This week's nominee (and it's Sunday, for crying out loud!)...

[alexpgp]

I never really realized that if you keep hitting the Tab key while in Print Layout view in Word, the cursor will jump across the page and then go to the next line.

Do you see the possibilities here?

I am the proud owner of a source document, a couple of thousand words long, containing the expected paragraphs and headings, but only about three paragraph marks in all because all of the formatting (including centered headings) was done using strings of tab characters!

Need to skip a line?

Tab, Tab, Tab, Tab, Tab, Tab, Tab, Tab, Tab, Tab, Tab, Tab, Tab, Tab, Tab, and Tab.

Voilá! All set for a new paragraph! No problem!

Aaarghhh!

Spacing that didn't fit conveniently in the scheme of Word's default tabs was taken care of by setting tabs, which probably explains the three paragraph characters.

The document looks like a word processing version of Hitchcock's Rope.

Do you have any idea of what happens to a document like this if you try to edit it or translate it? The layout discombobulates into a sticky mess, and that's if you're lucky.

Ye gods.

Cheers...

Comments

More work/less aggro?

[tamaraland.livejournal.com]

I was "blessed" with a couple of those documents not too long ago when I was doing the pandemic sitrep. Those which are formatted in such a psychotic fashion that you can't figure out what's going on when you try to edit, apply styles,etc.

I just pasted them into notepad, cleaned it up and then re-pasted the clean version into the sitrep and re-did the formatting.

I'm still not sure if it was more or less work, but at least it wasn't full of unpleasant surprises at every turn.

[eastexpert.livejournal.com]

Dare I say that sometimes it's possible to cough up a Regular Expression in Word's Find/Replace that you can actually replace such atrocities with something decent. There are special symbols you can use in Search expressions.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

I do that all the time in Office 2003, but could not find the same capabilities in Office 2007. If you could point me in the right direction, I'd be grateful.

Cheers...

[eastexpert.livejournal.com]

Right edge of Main ribbon/Editing group/Replace button, then More>> button and Special button at the bottom, working with Find What or Replace With field depending on where the focus is when you press "Special".

Lots of expressions, really...

As to how to replace unknown big number of tabs with line breaks, one idea could be to:
on Pass 1 - replace five tabs with a line break and then
on Pass 2 - replace tabs with nothing.

I haven't thought much about it, you may be able to coin up something better, having Word experience as your primary working tool...