Formatting Text Files with WordBasic

It is not uncommon to need to format text files in Word. For instance, you may get an e-mail message from someone that needs formatting, or you may get an ASCII file from a friend. The most common necessities in formatting such a file is to remove extra spaces or tabs from the beginning of a line, extra spaces or tabs from the end of a line, removing "reply" characters from the beginning of each line, and combining lines to make paragraphs.

Doing all this by hand is very time-consuming work, and can easily drive you batty, particularly if the file is very large. The following macro, DoASCII, should make it easier for you. It accomplishes all the tasks just recounted, and does it very quickly. This version is designed to work with Word 6 or Word 95:

Sub MAIN
StartOfDocument
EditFindClearFormatting
EditReplaceClearFormatting
EditReplace .Find = "^p^w", .Replace = "^p", .Direction = 0, _
  .MatchCase = 0, .WholeWord = 0, .PatternMatch = 0, _
  .SoundsLike = 0, .ReplaceAll, .Format = 0, .FindAllWordForms = 0
EditReplace .Find = "^p> ", .ReplaceAll
EditReplace .Find = "^p> ", .ReplaceAll
EditReplace .Find = "^p> ", .ReplaceAll
EditReplace .Find = "^p> ", .ReplaceAll
EditReplace .Find = "^p^w", .ReplaceAll
EditReplace .Find = "^w^p", .ReplaceAll
EditReplace .Find = "^p^p", .Replace = "[{}]", .ReplaceAll
EditReplace .Find = "^p", .Replace = " ", .ReplaceAll
EditReplace .Find = "[{}]", .Replace = "^p", .ReplaceAll
End Sub

You should note that this macro will replace up to four levels of "> " characters put at the beginning of a line. It also assumes that the only place you want paragraph breaks are those places where a blank line exists.