The World of Computing and Solutions

Question: I have a Microsoft Word 2003 document that is formated like a dictionary. The entries are various in words and abbreviations. The format of the entries in the document is like those words found in the Random House Webster’s Unabridge Dictionary. The entries are not sorted. I would like to sort the entries in accordance with the initial highlighted word. How can I do this?

Answer: The problem here is that Windows Word can not figure out how to sort your text. It’s not tabular so you can’t sort the columns. And sorting by paragraph wont work either because that would separate the individual lines of each entry. What you’ll have to do is reformat the text so that each entry is a single paragraph. Right now each line ends with a hard carriage return, making each line its own paragraph. You need to replace all but the terminating carriage return with a “new line” charater that starts a new line but doesn’t end the paragraph.

You need to retain the double carriage returns that represent the blank lines between entries. To do this, use Find/Replace to replace ^p^p with a marker string that appears nowhere in the document, for example, #$%. Next, use Find/Replace to replace ^p with ^l. This replaces the hard carriage return at the end of each line with a new-line character. Use find/Replace once more, this time to replace #$% with ^p. Now each entry is a separate paragraph. Select Table | Sort from the menu and perform a simple paragraph-based sort.
At this point your dictionary entries will be in sorted order, but they wil have lost some of the formatting.

Press Ctrl+A to highlight all the text. select Format | Paragraph from the menu. Set a hanging index to define the indentation for all lines after the first line in each paragraph.

You now have a document that closely resembles your original, except that it can be sorted now. When you add a new definition, remember to press Shift-Enter (this inserts a new-line character) at the end of all lines except the very last one in the definition.

Question: is there a way in Microsoft Word 2003 to search for only curly quotes, or straight quotes?

Answer: the solution is plain and weird. In the find dialog, click the More button and then check the box titled, Use Wildcards. Enter a regular double-quote in the Find what box. When Use Wildcards is checked, it will only find the regular, straight quotes.

To find the curly quotes, leave the Use Wildcards box checked and enter this in the Find what box: [“”]. That is, open square bracket, left curly quote, right curly quote, close square bracket. To enter the left curly quote, make sure that NumLock is on, hold down the Alt Key, tap out the numbers 0147 on the keypad (not the top-row numbers) and release the Alt Key. For the right curly quote, again hold down the Alt Key, and enter 0148 and release the Alt Key. Or you may find it easier to just copy and paste the curly quites from the document itself. While in the Use Wildcards mode, Word searches for any characters found within the square brackets, so you will find both left and right curly quotes this way.