finding missing periods in long documents and in included tables, then inserting

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Wendy - 06 Oct 2005 17:10 GMT

I am reformatting a large number of long documents and have completed much of
the work, including placing some of the content in tables. I am now searching
for instances of missing periods and inserting them. I can use find and
replace to find the end of a word followed by a paragraph mark, then manually
insert the period if it is actually a sentence (some of these instances are
fragments and I do not want to insert periods following them). This works
(painfully) for most text that is not within a table, but within a table I
need a different solution. Within the table, if a hard return has not been
entered, there is no paragraph mark. Instead, you see a small, grey box. I
have not found any way to find the end of a word followed by one of these.
And, as above, some of these instances are fragments and will not need
periods.

Can anyone help me to
1 - find and replace missing periods in text more easily?
2 - find and replace missing periods in table cells?

I can not do or use any VBA programming to accomplish this.

Thanks for any help!

Wendy

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Herb Tyson [MVP] - 07 Oct 2005 00:17 GMT

For the first question... An additional way to try to find sentences without
periods would be to look for the following pattern:

[lowercase letter][space(s)][uppercase letter]

...on the theory that capitals that follow lowercases stand a good chance of
being the first word in a sentence (although, they could as easily be proper
names).

To do this, in the Find and Replace dialog:

Find what:([a-z])( @)([A-Z])

Replace with:\1.\2\3

Make sure Use Wildcards is checked.

The Replace with uses \1 - \3 tokens for the three parenthetical expressions
in the Find What: field. It then inserts a period at the end of the orphaned
sentence, then puts in the space(s) and the letter that begins the following
sentence.

This will find a number of non-sentence breaks. There's also a chance that
if a sentence should end with a question mark, this particular replace can
only do one punctuation mark at a time... a period in this instance.

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Herb Tyson MS MVP
Please respond in the newsgroups so everyone can follow along.

>I am reformatting a large number of long documents and have completed much
>of
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>
> Wendy

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Wendy - 12 Oct 2005 16:59 GMT

Herb - thanks for your response. I tried your suggestion and it's a nice
solution for many situations, but these documents are instructions which
include a lot of references to buttons. menus, fields and screens, all of
which are capitalized, and many of which are multi-word. Here's an example:

"Click the Display button. The Display Options dialog box displays "

Note the missing period at the end of the second sentence.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks,

Wendy

>For the first question... An additional way to try to find sentences without
>periods would be to look for the following pattern:
[quoted text clipped - 27 lines]
>>
>> Wendy

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Kathy - 30 Oct 2005 23:14 GMT

A manual proofread would be the best solution.

It's surprising how many other inconsistencies you'll find when you do that.

Kathy

> Herb - thanks for your response. I tried your suggestion and it's a nice
> solution for many situations, but these documents are instructions which
[quoted text clipped - 42 lines]
> >>
> >> Wendy

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