Find & Replace line breaks in MS Word

As a designer I'm quite often working on text files here & there and sometimes cutting & pasting data from various sources into MS Word means that the formatting is all wrong (tip: paste into notepad first to strip formatting then paste that output into Word) or there's no formatting at all.

For instance - I want to find out how many items there were in this small business news page.

Rather than count line-by-line there's a labour-saving technique to be had with Find & Replace in Word. So I copied the main page content into Word and had a one-line output. Seeing that every item began with either '2007' or '2008' I simply executed find '2007' and replace all with '^p 2007' and find '2008' and replace all with '^p 2008'

^p 6p is basically a line break.

So I replaced all the year dates with linebreaks and ended up with 79 lines/articles

Life saver :)

Labels: copy writing, design, development, office, tips