I downloaded some text to word, but it comes out formatted like this: Instead of coming out like this: You could just say to go and correct it, but it's a lot of text (45 pages to be exact) which I don't feel like correcting. I tried using align, indent, and paragraph spacing to no avail. Any idea how to fix it?
I think we need to know what format it's coming from. Sometimes if you do a copy - paste WITHOUT formatting it helps with some of those things.
On the Home tab, in the Paragraph section, there's one of those symbols, the overlapping backward PPs that stand for a paragraph in old copyediting? If you hit that button it will show you the formatting in your text, and you might be able to figure out what the formatting is and then do a find and replace to get rid of whatever it is.
Tried that too (forgot to mention that,) it only changed the font to times new roman or does nothing at all.
I didn't have any issue with it. I can send you the word.doc There's a little bit which is not formatted correctly but it's not bad.
I haven't used Word for years, but when I last did, it was possible to view "hidden/non-printing characters" and then you could see what's causing the formatting issue. The search and replace was also pretty good - I seem to recall it once had "remove double paragraph breaks" or similar in a drop-down box. Given that the original was in HTML, there might be an issue with the <BR> tag being used instead of <P> or vice versa. A quick check in Google should help sort it out.
In my copy of Word, it works like this: At the find-and-replace menu, select "Advanced Search and Replace" in the box marked with the Settings icon. In the "find" box, type '^p" and then click on the "Replace" tab on the little working "window." Leave the "replace" input box blank. Select "replace all" and Bob's your uncle.