Before the advent of the computers, the typewriters were the most common equipment that were used to enter text or words without manually writing them down. The typewriter had a lever that was found at the right hand side and this was called the carriage return. When one pressed the said lever, it would send the carriage or the cylinder that held the paper to the left. At the same time, it would roll the paper upward and thus, started a new line. Moving on to the present, we can see in our computer keyboard that there is an arrow found at the background at the enter key. This means that the typewriter’s carriage return has evolved and has become the enter key that we are using today. Carriage return can also mean command or symbol that directs the printer to be in its position. Also, this causes the cursor to be at the left side margin. This manages the paper feeding as well. In Unicode and ASCII, this is represented by decimal 13 while in other programming languages including UNIX, Java and C, this is \r.
Now, in Microsoft Word, we can add or remove carriage returns or line breaks. You can also replace text with carriage return. This is often needed for those who are required to edit their documents. Now, in the document that you are working on, you will see the ¶ symbol which is a representation of a paragraph. The problem here lies with the fact that you cannot insert this in the box where you usually enter what you wish for Word to find and Replace.
Now, most would think that they have to utilize a macro so that they can start replacing a text with carriage return but this is not actually necessary. This is because Word in fact allows the use of the symbol ^p which is read as carat p. You can do this by simply pressing shift and then the number 6 key. Carat p (^p) represents the carriage return when you want to use it on the replace command.
Let us say that you wish to create a document that will allow you to have each word on a new line. All you have to do is open the Replace dialog box by going to the Edit menu and then click on Replace. You can also hit CTRL+H on the keyboard or CTRL+F and just click on the Replace tab when the dialog box appears. In the Find what box, you can press space and then in the Replace with box, you can enter “^p” without the quotes. You can click on Replace All for faster moving of all the words to a new line. Now, you can replace text with carriage return or even the spaces in your document easily. Meanwhile, if you wish to remove the double spaces that appear when you copy and paste web content in your document, you can go to the Replace dialog box again and in Find what, enter ^p^p while in the Replace with box, input only a single ^p.
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Article Source: Smart Ways to Replace Text with Carriage Return
