bringing short lines together to make one line

H

Hoges in WA

Hi. I save OE posts of 60's Top 100 tracks each week. They are set out with
the title of the song and to the right its position in the chart, last week's
position and highest position. Beneath that is the artist. I want to make
them one-line lists. I can get rid of the numbers easily by replacing them
with nothing, leaving me with a lot of blank spaces. I still have the song
on one line followed by the artist on the next line. I want to bring the
second line up to the first line so I can then sort and delete multiples
(songs are in the charts many times).

I have tried deleting the blank spaces but it still won't bring the second
line up to the first line. As I'm doing very large numbers of these, I
wondered if there's any quick way of doing it other than me going along to
the end of each line and deleting the end-of-line mark? I hope.
thanks Hoges in WA
 
A

Anne Troy

Turn your show/hide button on. Determine what the character is that's making
the line break. It could be a line break or it could be a paragraph return,
or even a tab or a table (make sure Table-->Show Gridlines). Then you can
delete the line break or return. Perhaps you'll get lucky and there's a line
break after the song and a return after the artist, thereby allowing you to
use find/replace (See Edit-->Find and Replace-->More-->Special...) to get
rid of the line break.
See:
http://www.officearticles.com/word/show-hide_button_in_microsoft_word.htm
************
Anne Troy
www.OfficeArticles.com
 
H

Hoges in WA

Not that lucky. At the end of each line is a return. I can't put a return
in the Replace field as it won't edit>paste. Even if I could, it would
string the whole page together and I'd have a similar problem going through
and reinputting returns at the end of the lines I do want.
I don't think the returns are hard input ones, as if I Del the blank spaces,
the lower line comes up anyway. Maybe I'm not explaining it all that well
but it sure is irritating me - I probably have something over 300 pages to
format like this yet if I could get rid of the bits i don't want it would
probably condense down to about 30 pages all up.
 
H

Hoges in WA

That would seem to be the solution!!. It's too late at night here for me to
get my head around it now (it's nearly midnight) so I'll do it tomorrow.
Thanks
 
D

Daiya Mitchell

Not that lucky. At the end of each line is a return. I can't put a return
in the Replace field as it won't edit>paste.
Click to expand...

Side note: to do this, click on More in the Replace dialog, and the Special
menu will allow you to enter such characters. Once you learn the codes, you
can just type them in instead of bothering with the menus.
 
H

Hoges in WA

That "More>Replace>Special" is mint! I didn't know I could replace all
digits at one go - I've been doing 1 replace all 2 replace all 3 replace all.
Now I can do it once only.

The tip in "Cleaning up text pasted from the Web" about centre justifying
and then left justifying works well too - that used to drive me crazy.

I am most of the way towards doing this. Each line has a pilcrow so it's
coming from OE as a paragraph per line. The Autoformat is half-working - I
can't do the suggested clean up in "Cleaning up...." above because there are
no hard return lines and no line breaks - each one is a paragraph.

However, using the "More>Replace>Special" is getting most of the way there
because it's wrapping each two lines at roughly where I have my margin set.
I don't think it's going to be a perfect solution but it's way better than
what I was doing before and what I was faced with.

For those interested in this little exercise, what I am doing is retrieving
the Top 100 lists of each week of each year of the 60s. I am then combining
the files, cleaning up the stuff I don't want and sorting into order. I then
end up with multiples of some songs (as they are in the Top 100 many times in
some cases) and keeping only one. I can then peruse and see what's left. If
I have the track already, I can clear it. If I don't, I can put it on my
list to go get. What I am aiming for by the end of next year, when all lists
have been published, is a complete list of every track that made the top 100
duing 1960. If I like the track, I'll then add it to my MusicMatch library
(currently 3,400-odd tracks). If I don't, I just don't bother with it. Just
so you know what started this.
Thanks Terry Hogan (in south west of Western Australia)
 
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