Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated July 24, 2021)
This tip applies to Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003
Zach is constantly pasting quotes from PDF files into the body of his Word documents. He'd like to have a macro specifically for pasting from PDF that pastes without any formatting and automatically removes the paragraph breaks that are at the end of each line of the pasted text.
It is relatively easy to work with text in this manner in a macro. All you need to do is move the information from the Clipboard to a string variable. Once it is in the variable, there is no longer any formatting associated with the text and you can search for and replace the paragraph breaks. The following macro performs both steps:
Sub PastePDFClean() Dim MyData As DataObject Dim sTextIn As String Dim x As Integer Dim y As Integer Set MyData = New DataObject MyData.GetFromClipboard sTextIn = MyData.GetText x = InStr(sTextIn, vbCr) y = 1 While x > 0 sTextIn = Left(sTextIn, x - 1) & Mid(sTextIn, x + 1) y = x + 1 x = InStr(y, sTextIn, vbCr) Wend Selection.TypeText sTextIn Set MyData = Nothing End Sub
Remember; the macro works on whatever is in the Clipboard. So, in order to run the macro properly on a PDF selection, you need to copy the selection to the Clipboard and switch to your Word document before you run the macro.
Note:
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (583) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003.
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