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General discussion

how to replace time display and/or insert line break

by mdm_subs Jan 31, 2007 6:14AM PST

hi,
i actually got two questions about formatting some text in word.

a) need to find military time and replace it with "standard" am/pm time.

b)i need to replace certain characters with a line break

my workflow: a .txt file is given to me and I copy its contents into word for further formatting.

in the source text are lots of "times". these are in "military/european" format.
for example: 14:08:53 instead of 02:08:53 PM
i need to find and replace all those military times with standard american times.

i already checked the "more" options in the find and replace dialog and didn't find anything.

maybe this problem can only be solved in another application... i already looked around but didn't find anything.... any ideas?

the second thing... i need to replace some special characters with a line break. sounds simple, but there was something weird going on and i didnt get the expected results. if i replace with "manual line break" ^l it doesnt work...
if i use a paragraph character, it doesn't work either....

thanks for any hint.

btw: i am not fluent in writing scripts by myself

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Re: editing

by Kees Bakker Jan 31, 2007 3:56PM PST

mdm_subs,

I'm afraid the editing of the times is just a lot of dumb manual work somebody has to do. And it might be you. Using edit>find to search for : would be a good start.
Writing a macro to change a selected occurrence probably is more work than that, unless you're fluent in Word VBA. And writing a macro to find all the occurrences you need to change is still more work.

Changing the characters into line-break or paragraph mark should work. It might help to set Word to display all non-printable characters (in Tools>Options>View) and see what's going in. If you can do the replace manually (by deleting these characters and inserting ctrl-enter or enter) edit>replace should work also. Your post doesn't have the details to find out what's wrong.

Kees

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