Word - vista

[Margaret N]

Please can someone help me sort a small problem with Word. I have just copied an email into word and it is all bunched up to one side and this uses about three pages. I wish to display it as a normal text on A4 ~ how do I do it please?

I days of old I found it easy in XP but Vista I can never find a suitable Key Word. Is Windows 7 really an improvement?

[col48]

I guess this is because the email has short lines.

You could try replacing the end-of-line characters with spaces. Word wraps round automatically.
I don't use Word any more, so you may need to try more than one of these...
Open the Find/Replace dialog (Keyboard this will be Ctrl and H together, unless they have merged it with the Find dialog, which is Ctrl and F)
You need to put ^n or ^l (that is the character above the 6 on the keyboard followed by lowercase N or L respectively) in what you want to replace - these are special codes which stand for new line (carriage return and line feed together in old-speak). I am not sure which one will (should!) work, but the one which doesn't should have no effect. In the lower box (what you want to replace it with) just type a space - if you don't do this there will be no gap between the text at the end of one line and the start of the next and this will not be easy to sort out.
Then click "replace all".

This should be documented in Word's Help text - try "special characters" or "Replace" or "Non-printing characters". You can see the characters (as single characters, not in the ^n style) in the text if you click on the button displaying a printer's paragraph character which looks like an elaborate backwards P and may be labelled "Non-printing characters". Click on it again and they disappear.

Hope this helps.

[Cloggie]

I don't think this is anything to do with Vista, and Windows 7 won't change anything either. As col48 says, it is likely to be because conversion of an e-mail text into Word puts a paragraph mark/hard return at the end of every line. You'll have to take the hard returns out manually (after displaying them by clicking on the show/hide paragraph marks & formatting symbols icon) or by using find & replace as col48 has described.

You don't say what version of Word you're using. Word 2007 has a very different look to Word 2003 and takes a bit of getting used to, although it is very easy to use once you figure out what's in what menu tab. I haven't used Word 2010 yet, but I expect it's similar to 2007. Depending on which version of Word you're using, the line spacing may also be different in your Word document than in the e-mail. In Word 2003, you can change the line spacing using Format > Paragraph > Indents and Spacing.
This explains how to change line spacing in Word 2007: http://thenewpaperclip.com/2007/05/2...-in-word-2007/

Have you tried using the Help feature in Word at all? I find that very useful when i get stuck or forget how to do something. Just click on the question mark icon at the top right of the menu to start searching Help. In this case you could enter search terms like: "paragraph marks" or "line spacing"

Also see: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/ which gives Help information for Word 2010, 2007 and 2003 (click on the appropriate version on the right).

[MarionH]

I don't use Vista so this may be a silly question - when I copy something into Word and it doesn't format correctly I just tell it to "past special" and then paste it as unformatted text. Just a thought - as I said I don't use Vista - tried it a couple of times on other puters and it seems more compex I must admit!

[Cloggie]

Yes, Paste Special can help with formatting problems. Also, a little clipboard icon will often appear when you paste into Word, which gives you different options: Keep Source Formatting, Match Destination Formatting, and Keep Text Only.
I don't think any of these options will remove extra hard returns from a text though.

This has a good explanation of Paste options in Word (2007): http://www.dummies.com/how-to/conten...l-in-word.html
And lots of other useful explanations for Word: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/comput...fice/Word.html

[Margaret N]

Hello Col 48, Sarah and Marion,
I agree it is nothing actually to do with Windows or Vista and by the way I have Office/Home/Student 2007. I did not get the option on Paste Special as Marion suggested I find that only works on XP for this problem.
In the end I finally clicked in front on each sentence and did a hard return until I had worked through the document and I made it in the end.
I will read all your links after I post this reply and thank you for them. It is just the keywords that fool me often. I do find the ?mark very useful and I think the information is good.
Thank you all for your contributions to yet another of my problems.
Cheers,