Removing Tabs Used to Indent a Paragraph

If you frequently convert documents from a different word processor to Word, there is a good chance you must remove tabs inserted at the beginning of paragraphs. Some word processors require tabs in order to indent the first line of a paragraph; Word does not.

About the only way to remove the unnecessary tabs is to go to the beginning of each of the paragraphs and press the Del key. You could, however, use the Replace option from the Edit menu in order to search for tabs and remove them. (Actually, you would search for a paragraph mark followed by a tab; this would then be replaced with a paragraph, thereby deleting the tab.)

A quicker way to take care of this problem is to develop a macro to do it for you. The following macro, TabsOut, searches for any hard return/tab combinations in your document (or your selected text) and removes the tab.

Sub TabsOut()
    If Selection.Type <> wdNoSelection Then
        Selection.HomeKey Unit:=wdStory, Extend:=wdMove
    End If
    Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
    Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
    With Selection.Find
        .Text = "^p^t"
        .Replacement.Text = "^p^
        .Forward = True
        .Wrap = wdFindContinue
        .Format = False
    End With
    Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End Sub