[Rom915]

Hello everyone. I am new to this forum and hope I have put this message in the right place.

I do a lot of repetitive work formatting dialogue scripts that I usually receive as a Word document, and I then have to reformat and cut and paste into standardised Excel document that gives each person’s dialogue a separate cell.

There are two main things that I need to do to clean up the initial document:

1. Remove timecode information (hh:mm:ss;ff), I would usually have between 2 and 3,000 of these scattered throughout the document.
2. Join split sentences together so that I can place a complete sentence into one cell.

My current workflow consists of going line by line to first delete each timecode and then I deleted the spaces between words and commas and carriage return at full stops to block each sentence into a separate line. I then select the entire document and paste this into Excel.

I have tried the following in Word:

Find & Replace using * but this identifies all the numbers in the document and does not really work as there are other numbers that I need to keep.

I have used ^p to block the entire document into one chunk and then I go through it to create full sentences in blocks.

I then cut and paste this into Excel. Remove the timecode using Find & Replace ??:??:??;?? which works great but unfortunately does not work in Word. Then I remove all the empty lines (blanks) using edit/go to.

It is a very long-winded process, and I was wondering if there is anyone that could help me find a quicker way of doing all this. By the way, I working with the latest versions of Microsoft Office 365 on a mac.

Thanks, and looking forward to hearing back from someone.