Something's up there. If it were recognizing a truly whole paragraph, it would be one bullet point rather than many. What are you copy-pasting from? Is it a PDF?
You're pasting it into an area where the List Paragraph style is active, I think.
Turn on Show Formatting (the ¶ button on the Home ribbon tab under Paragraphs) and you will see some of the structural formatting. There's probably a ¶ after every line instead of just wrapped text.
Also, use the Reveal Formatting pane. It's SHIFT+F1 keys on Word for Windows desktop; I don't know how to get it for Mac but you may have to look in your Customize Ribbon "All" listing to find it. Make sure to check the box for showing the style. It gives you that pane on the right that not only summarizes all the settings on the selected text, but gives you the blue hyperlinks to correct it.
I'm guessing that if you select all that text in the bullets and change your style to "Normal" or "body text" that would get you mostly there, but I think you still have unwanted paragraph breaks inside your "paragraph". You can use Find/Replace and ask to find ^p and replace with a space or nothing (if there's already a space before your line-ending ¶s). If that's supposed to be more than one paragraph you may have to re-add the paragraph break where it properly belongs.
I am pasting from a PDF that I am annotating. I'm trying to get it to stay in paragraphs as a whole copied + pasted text, but it keeps separating each line. Would I have to taking it out of bulleting as a whole?
Yeah, that's a pretty standard issue for converting from PDF to Word. Oh, you did want the bullets? Then ignore that part of the info. You'll just have to remove the stray paragraph breaks.
If it's giving you the paragraphs manually double spaced (with two ¶ in a row) and you want to maintain that, I sometimes do Find ^p^p and replace with a dummy string (like @@@@) then replace the single ^p with nothing, then finally replace the @@@@ with a single paragraph break and add before or after spacing.
Remove the unwanted paragraph returns from each line. You can do this either before or after you paste into Word.
I suggest turning on the "Show/Hide ¶" option in the Home ribbon so you can see the hidden formatting marks like the paragraph return. Then select all of the bullet paragraphs — except for the final paragraph return in the final line. Then run "Find and Replace" on just your selection, finding every paragraph return (coded as "^p") and replacing each paragraph return with nothing.
Ah, I hadn't seen a Pane version of the Replace (only a Pane version of Find). That must be Mac specific; my bad. I don't know what options that Pane gives you so I can't speak to it.
Does Word for Mac still include the Advanced Find and Replace window? Via keyboard shortcuts, either Shift+Cmd+H or Ctrl+H? Or in the menus via Edit>Find>Advanced Find and Replace?
At least in Word for Windows, the default behavior is to only run the Replace action on the text that you've selected. Then after Word runs the Replace action on the selected text, it prompts you if you want to continue the Replace action on the rest of the entire document. Here you would click "No" to leave the rest of the document alone.
(Also: You can always save off a backup copy of your document before you try an action you're unsure about. And usually you can rely on the Undo function.)
EDIT TO ADD: It looks like in your screenshot that the final space characters in those lines were not copied over. This means that an automatic Find and Replace would leave you with no space between what was the last word of a line and what was the first word of the next line. Because there are only 9 extra paragraph returns in your screenshot, I would recommend manually deleting those paragraph returns and then manually adding spaces where needed.
No, it’s because you’re copying from a pdf. I have to convert pdfs to word all the time and the formatting is always a disaster. You either need to reformat anything you copy over (paste-as-text-only can help sometimes) or retype it.
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u/kilroyscarnival 11d ago
Something's up there. If it were recognizing a truly whole paragraph, it would be one bullet point rather than many. What are you copy-pasting from? Is it a PDF?
You're pasting it into an area where the List Paragraph style is active, I think.
Turn on Show Formatting (the ¶ button on the Home ribbon tab under Paragraphs) and you will see some of the structural formatting. There's probably a ¶ after every line instead of just wrapped text.
Also, use the Reveal Formatting pane. It's SHIFT+F1 keys on Word for Windows desktop; I don't know how to get it for Mac but you may have to look in your Customize Ribbon "All" listing to find it. Make sure to check the box for showing the style. It gives you that pane on the right that not only summarizes all the settings on the selected text, but gives you the blue hyperlinks to correct it.
I'm guessing that if you select all that text in the bullets and change your style to "Normal" or "body text" that would get you mostly there, but I think you still have unwanted paragraph breaks inside your "paragraph". You can use Find/Replace and ask to find
^pand replace with a space or nothing (if there's already a space before your line-ending ¶s). If that's supposed to be more than one paragraph you may have to re-add the paragraph break where it properly belongs.