Find and Replace Soft Carriage Returns in MS Word

Problem

You have generated some output that is peppered with soft carriage returns. You want to remove the soft carriage returns from the document, so you can continue processing that text, moving it over into Excel or whatever it is you wish to do with it.

Solution

The built-in MS Word Find and Replace feature can do this!

It is possible to specify the soft carriage return character with ^l

Find: ^l

Replace with: leave this field blank

Job done!

Follow Up

Within MS Word and MS Excel, you can use the following combinations to Find and potentially Replace invisible characters.

^l - soft carriage return ( ⮐ )

^p - hard carriage return ( ¶ )