At 15:20 27/10/2020 -0500, Aloris "Hellen" Te wrote:
I have one question: I am unable to do a find/replace on a line
break [as when a user hits "enter" and is reflected as the
"paragraph symbol" when the nonprinting characters (CTRL+F10) is
active]. In other words, if I have an address list with 30 addresses
in Writer, but I want to move it over to the spreadsheet in address
format, I don't want each line to be put in each cell...I want the
address to show up in the spreadsheet as one complete address per
cell. But because there is no capability to find/replace the
paragraph end, I cannot make the lines appear in the same cell, with
a soft return in the same cell. I appreciate if someone could assist
me to discover the right method of find/replace.
First, the effect of pressing Enter and which is represented by a
pilcrow (what you are calling a "paragraph symbol") is a paragraph
break, not a line break. Line breaks are created in text documents by
pressing Shift+Enter and are shown by a bent left-pointing arrow.
There is a workaround you can use once you have pasted the material
into a spreadsheet:
o Select all the cells corresponding to one address - using click and
Shift+click.
o Go to Format | Merge Cells (or click the Merge Cells button in the
Formatting toolbar).
o Click Yes to acknowledge the merging of cell data. (Merge helpfully
adds a space between each original cell content.)
o Now you have a cell occupying more than one row. Simply use Merge
Cells again immediately to separate the rows and move the contents to
the first row.
o Select the unwanted blank cells and use Edit| Delete Cells... (or
right-click | Delete...) to delete them.
o Repeat for other addresses.
This may seem a heavy workload, but it is worth saying that you may
have to do some work on your data anyway. If your addresses follow on
in your text document, there is no way that OpenOffice can guess
where one finishes and the next starts. If you have indicated the
breaks between addresses in some way (an empty paragraph?), you have
not let on about how this is.
o If necessary, press Enter where required in the text file to add an
empty paragraph between each address.
o Go to Tools | AutoCorrect Options... | Options.
o Ensure "Combine single line paragraphs if length is greater than
...%" is ticked.
o With this option still selected, click Edit... and modify "Minimum
size" to some suitable small value - perhaps even 0%.
o Go to Format | AutoCorrect > | Apply. (Note that it appears that
each address line needs not to end with a full stop for this to
work.) Each address becomes one paragraph; again, intervening spaces
are automatically added.
o Use Find & Replace with "^$" (no quotes) in the "Search for" box
and nothing in the "Replace with" box (and More Options | Regular
expressions ticked) to remove the empty paragraphs.
o Copy and paste into the spreadsheet.
I'm guessing that by "soft return" you mean that you want the
original address lines to remain as separate lines within the
spreadsheet cell containing that address. You can insert such line
breaks using Ctrl+Enter in the spreadsheet cell. I don't know of any
way to carry these over automatically from a text document.
I trust this helps.
Brian Barker
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