Selecting the first sentence of multiple paragraphs in Word 2007

[Francois Griebenow]

I have a list of facts (for a textbook) in the following format:

1 The Earth is a huge ball of rock moving through space at nearly 3000 metres per second. It weighs 6000 million, million, million tonnes. Up to two-thirds of the Earth’s rocky surface is covered by water – this makes the seas and oceans. Rock that is not covered by water makes the land.

2 The Earth came from a cloud in space. Scientists think the Earth formed from a huge cloud of gas and dust around 4500 million years ago. A star near the cloud exploded, making the cloud spin. As the cloud spun around, gases gathered at its centre and formed the Sun.

3 At first the Earth was very hot. As the rocks crashed together they warmed each other up. Later, as the Earth formed, the rocks inside it melted.The new Earth was a ball of liquid rock with a thin, solid shell.

I would like to select and bold the first sentence of each parapgraph. How do I do that?

I'm not a very advanced user, so if you're going to give me code, I'll also need directions on how to implement / apply it.

Thanks in advance!

FG

 

[macropod]

You could try a wildcard Find/Replace, where:
Find = ^13[A-Z][!^13.\!\?;:]@[.\!\?;:]
Replace = ^&
and you set the replacement format to bold. To avoid affecting other content, you could also specify that the Find expression is to look for text that is not already bold. Note that this will also format the preceding paragraph break as bold. A second Find/Replace could be used to undo that - but that would also affect other paragraphs that should be bolded.

Anything more sophisticated (i.e. not bolding the paragraph break) would require a macro.

Note also that the Find/Replace will stop bolding at the first period, exclamation mark, question mark, colon or semi-colon it finds in each paragraph, not necessarily at the end of the first grammatical sentence. A macro would be similarly limited.

 

[Francois Griebenow]

Thank you! I eventually recorded a macro that bolded the first sentence and was able to repeat it with use of the down arrow, which finished the job in good time. However, your find and replace formula will come in handy next time. Thanks for taking the time to reply.