In Word, it’s easy to find, replace your mistakes

Every once in a while, someone asks me if you should place one space or two after a period at the end of a sentence. The answer is one. Putting two spaces after a period is an archaic holdover from typewriter days before we had proportional fonts.

However, every once in a while I have to deal with a document written by someone who doesn’t know this small rule of typography. The document is filled with a whole lot of extra spaces that need to be removed. Fortunately, in Microsoft Word it’s easy to find and replace non-printing characters like spaces. In fact, you can tell Word to search and replace even more obscure items like section breaks and paragraph returns as well.

To find and replace spaces, you don’t need to do anything fancy. Choose Edit|Replace and type two spaces into the Find What box. Yes, you place your cursor in the box and press your space bar two times. You won’t see anything, since it’s a space, but that’s OK. In the Replace box, type one space. Click Find Next and Word finds the first occurrence of two spaces. Click Replace. If you want to do them all at once, click Replace All.

To find other non-printing characters, you again use the Replace dialog box. Click the More button and the Replace dialog enlarges with a lot more options. Click the Special button and you see a whole laundry list of items you can find. Click to select an item and Word puts a special code into the Find field. Of course, once you’ve done this a few times, you figure out what the codes are. For example, I often need to search for two paragraph returns and replace them with one. The special code for paragraph is ^p, so I just put it into the Find what box myself.

Creative use of the Replace dialog box can save a tremendous amount of time. The next time you find yourself laboriously changing something in a document, see if there’s a way you can use the Replace function instead.