How to paste from Notepad into Word without getting extra line breaks after every line

Question

When I copy text from Notepad and paste it into Microsoft Word (2016) there is an extra line break after every single line.

How do I prevent his from happening?

I found a way to delete all blank lines in a Word document, but that won't help as I need the blank lines that are supposed to be there.

This is not an issue of Microsoft Word using double spacing. There are extra lines.

Turning off word wrap in Notepad didn't change the results (as each line is under 50 characters or so.

Thanks.

Answer 1

This happens because Word adds spacing after each paragraph, and it considers each pasted line a new paragraph.

Select all text (e.g. Control-A), right-click the selected text, then select Paragraph. Check the box "Don't add space between paragraphs of the same style".

Answer 2

File > Options > Advanced > Cut and Paste and then click on a button that shows even more advanced options in a little window (I am not sure what this is called since my MS Word is Japanese) and in that remove the check on the Adjust space between paragraphs which is the second checkbox I think.

I have also removed the first one since Word was adding in spaces between words (even if they were file addresses such as C:/TEMP/folder or whatever).

I tried Don't add space between paragraphs of the same style but it was already checked.

Answer 3

There are 2 options:

Option 1: Using MS Word, after pasting

1. Paste your text
2. Open the "Find and Replace" dialog by pressing Ctrl + H
   In the "Find what" box type ^p
   In the "Preplace by" box type ^l
3. Use the "Find next" and "Replace" buttons, or the "Replace All" button to convert the paragraph endings ("extra line breaks") into normal line endings.

Attention: Using the "Replace All" button will turn all your parapgrah endings into simple line endings, not just those in the text you've just pasted.

Option 2: Copy the text already with the correct line endings

The reason why MS Word displays the line feeds from your pasted text as paragraph endings is that they are encoded as CR LF ("Carriage return", "Line feed"). To have MS word interpret them as simple line feeds they would have to be encoded just as "Line feed" (LF). Some more advanced editors let you choose what line ending you want to use. E.g. in the Visual Studio Code editor you can toggle between CRLF and LF line endings (right-hand side in status bar). To leverage that feature

1. In Visual Studo Code set the end of line sequence to just LF
2. Select and copy the text
3. Paste it in MS Word
4. In case it applied any formatting (font, colour), set it to what you want, e.g. using Word's Format Painter tool