Thanks Anne, I had already deduced this approach for myself. It will do the
trick and so, strictly speaking your suggestion does answer the question, but
it is a cumbersome, multi-step approach. I was hoping someone knew of an
"import", "file open", "reformatting" or "re-flowing" or other such function
that could take care of this in one step. What frustrates me is that I can't
imagine that this is such an unusual task. Notepad users, as well as other
users like me of old PC-DOS editors frequently used this sort of line and
paragraph formatting. Even a function that would take one complete selection
of text and make it one paragraph would be a help, as it would give me
paragraph by paragraph conversion control.

Thanks for posting though, Anne.

Peggy

"Anne Troy" wrote:

Peggy: You can get VERY creative with find and replace. Hit Ctrl+H and then
hit the More and Special buttons.
Likely, something like find two paragraph returns (^p^p) and replace with
PARARETURN (this is only temporary so you can safely do the next step), then
find one paragraph return (^p) and replace with a space. Then find
PARARETURN and replace with a paragraph return (^p).
************
Hope it helps!
Anne Troy
www.OfficeArticles.com

"Peggy1959" wrote in message
...
I have a lot of old .txt files that I'd like to convert to .rtf or .doc
files
to be managed from now on in Word instead of in Notepad. These text files
have what Word interprets to be a paragraph mark at the end of each line,
and
since my writing style is to double space paragraphs, two paragraph marks
at
the end of each paragraph. Of course, this effectively eliminates
appropriate
word wrapping as I either change the margin width, font or font size, or
just
edit the text.

How can I convert these files to effectively eliminate the single
paragraph
marks and convert the doubles to singles? Doing so would, I think, give me
a
Word compatible paragraph format with full wrap flexibility.

Thanks,
Peggy