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#1
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finding missing periods in long documents and in included tables, then inserting
I am reformatting a large number of long documents and have completed much of
the work, including placing some of the content in tables. I am now searching for instances of missing periods and inserting them. I can use find and replace to find the end of a word followed by a paragraph mark, then manually insert the period if it is actually a sentence (some of these instances are fragments and I do not want to insert periods following them). This works (painfully) for most text that is not within a table, but within a table I need a different solution. Within the table, if a hard return has not been entered, there is no paragraph mark. Instead, you see a small, grey box. I have not found any way to find the end of a word followed by one of these. And, as above, some of these instances are fragments and will not need periods. Can anyone help me to 1 - find and replace missing periods in text more easily? 2 - find and replace missing periods in table cells? I can not do or use any VBA programming to accomplish this. Thanks for any help! Wendy |
#2
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For the first question... An additional way to try to find sentences without
periods would be to look for the following pattern: [lowercase letter][space(s)][uppercase letter] ....on the theory that capitals that follow lowercases stand a good chance of being the first word in a sentence (although, they could as easily be proper names). To do this, in the Find and Replace dialog: Find what[a-z])( @)([A-Z]) Replace with:\1.\2\3 Make sure Use Wildcards is checked. The Replace with uses \1 - \3 tokens for the three parenthetical expressions in the Find What: field. It then inserts a period at the end of the orphaned sentence, then puts in the space(s) and the letter that begins the following sentence. This will find a number of non-sentence breaks. There's also a chance that if a sentence should end with a question mark, this particular replace can only do one punctuation mark at a time... a period in this instance. -- Herb Tyson MS MVP Please respond in the newsgroups so everyone can follow along. "Wendy via OfficeKB.com" u14628@uwe wrote in message news:5570aa9c1bbc0@uwe... I am reformatting a large number of long documents and have completed much of the work, including placing some of the content in tables. I am now searching for instances of missing periods and inserting them. I can use find and replace to find the end of a word followed by a paragraph mark, then manually insert the period if it is actually a sentence (some of these instances are fragments and I do not want to insert periods following them). This works (painfully) for most text that is not within a table, but within a table I need a different solution. Within the table, if a hard return has not been entered, there is no paragraph mark. Instead, you see a small, grey box. I have not found any way to find the end of a word followed by one of these. And, as above, some of these instances are fragments and will not need periods. Can anyone help me to 1 - find and replace missing periods in text more easily? 2 - find and replace missing periods in table cells? I can not do or use any VBA programming to accomplish this. Thanks for any help! Wendy |
#3
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Herb - thanks for your response. I tried your suggestion and it's a nice
solution for many situations, but these documents are instructions which include a lot of references to buttons. menus, fields and screens, all of which are capitalized, and many of which are multi-word. Here's an example: "Click the Display button. The Display Options dialog box displays " Note the missing period at the end of the second sentence. Any other suggestions? Thanks, Wendy Herb Tyson [MVP] wrote: For the first question... An additional way to try to find sentences without periods would be to look for the following pattern: [lowercase letter][space(s)][uppercase letter] ...on the theory that capitals that follow lowercases stand a good chance of being the first word in a sentence (although, they could as easily be proper names). To do this, in the Find and Replace dialog: Find what[a-z])( @)([A-Z]) Replace with:\1.\2\3 Make sure Use Wildcards is checked. The Replace with uses \1 - \3 tokens for the three parenthetical expressions in the Find What: field. It then inserts a period at the end of the orphaned sentence, then puts in the space(s) and the letter that begins the following sentence. This will find a number of non-sentence breaks. There's also a chance that if a sentence should end with a question mark, this particular replace can only do one punctuation mark at a time... a period in this instance. I am reformatting a large number of long documents and have completed much of [quoted text clipped - 22 lines] Wendy -- Message posted via OfficeKB.com http://www.officekb.com/Uwe/Forums.a...gdocs/200510/1 |
#4
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finding missing periods in long documents and in included tables, then inserting
A manual proofread would be the best solution.
It's surprising how many other inconsistencies you'll find when you do that. Kathy "Wendy via OfficeKB.com" u14628@uwe wrote in message news:55bc018645587@uwe... Herb - thanks for your response. I tried your suggestion and it's a nice solution for many situations, but these documents are instructions which include a lot of references to buttons. menus, fields and screens, all of which are capitalized, and many of which are multi-word. Here's an example: "Click the Display button. The Display Options dialog box displays " Note the missing period at the end of the second sentence. Any other suggestions? Thanks, Wendy Herb Tyson [MVP] wrote: For the first question... An additional way to try to find sentences without periods would be to look for the following pattern: [lowercase letter][space(s)][uppercase letter] ...on the theory that capitals that follow lowercases stand a good chance of being the first word in a sentence (although, they could as easily be proper names). To do this, in the Find and Replace dialog: Find what[a-z])( @)([A-Z]) Replace with:\1.\2\3 Make sure Use Wildcards is checked. The Replace with uses \1 - \3 tokens for the three parenthetical expressions in the Find What: field. It then inserts a period at the end of the orphaned sentence, then puts in the space(s) and the letter that begins the following sentence. This will find a number of non-sentence breaks. There's also a chance that if a sentence should end with a question mark, this particular replace can only do one punctuation mark at a time... a period in this instance. I am reformatting a large number of long documents and have completed much of [quoted text clipped - 22 lines] Wendy -- Message posted via OfficeKB.com http://www.officekb.com/Uwe/Forums.a...gdocs/200510/1 |
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