How to find and replace line breaks in Microsoft 365?

Question

I imported a document into Word and it added a lot of extra line breaks. I attempted to use the Find and Replace to get rid of all the extras. In previous versions of Word it was pretty simple. In the Find and Replace window, one enables the "Wildcards" and then under the "Special" dropdown, you could find "Manual Line Break" which would give you "^l" and you could find the "Paragraph mark" which would give you "^p".

However, the "Paragraph mark" is no longer listed, and there doesn't seem to be a way to insert it into the find box. I tried typing in "^p", and I tried shift + "right arrow" to copy one and paste in the box. Both were a no go. The "Manual Line Break" selection "^l" does not affect the regular line breaks.

How do you use find and replace to remove extra line breaks?

Answer 1

To search for manual line breaks and/or manual paragraph breaks (paragraph marks), you don't need to enable the "Use wildcards" option. In fact, as you have noticed, you'll see different options at the Special dropdown when you are running a wildcard find & replace.

Display nonprinting marks, for example by clicking the ¶ icon on the Home tab, to get a clearer picture of what you are dealing with. Are text "lines" ending with a paragraph mark (¶)? In that case, you have single-line paragraphs rather than manual line breaks.

See http://wordfaqs.ssbarnhill.com/CleanWebText.htm.