The QQQ Trick for Word Formatting
Have you ever copied and pasted something into Word, only to discover it inserts paragraph returns in odd places? [You’ll need to have your Show/Hide button on to see them and other Word formatting.] This commonly happens when you copy and paste text from an email or a web page into Word.
If you have a lot of text facing this problem, you’ll love this trick! I learned it from Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords. He calls it the QQQ Trick.
- Press CTRL+H, search for ^p^p and replace it with QQQ
- Search for ^p and replace it with nothing.
- Search for QQQ and replace it with ^p^p
Voilà – you have reflowable text again. You may still have a little bit of clean up to do, but this trick is really fabulous.
This trick has other uses with other variations. Essentially, you’re using a wildcard – QQQ – as a temporary placeholder for something. Note: Mark chose QQQ because the letters are unlikely to ever appear in natural language.
Try it out and let me know how you like it by commenting below…