Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I use M$Word because there does not seem to be any way to search and replace control characters in Open Office Writer. I have read dozens of pages, help files, etc with no help in sight. Just a bunch of confused supposed solutions for specific cases. So far, I find that Open Office Writer can not replace M$Word for reformatting text unless you do every task manually as it seems to be impossible to replace three control M characters with two control M characters or a control T character with a comma space or vice versa. Control M is the paragraph character and control T is the tab character. There are other control characters I find embedded in text and it would be convenient to be able to do a global search and replace for them as well. Until a workable solution is presented, I have no choice but to continue working with M$Word. Too many of my word processing jobs involve embedded formatting and control characters.

You should be able to find a tab with Search and Replace using \t with "Regular Expressions" checked. For carriage control characters try installing AltSearch.

I looked at AltSearch and it is way over complicated with a high learning curve, so why should I try to use it when I simply want to be able to search for and replace control characters embedded in text? So far, since there is no solution for any except two of the control characters, I am compelled to continue to use M$Word. I will admit that Open Office is great for composing, but for reformatting, not.

So far, {control N (line break) [\N]} and {control T (tab) [\T]} were the only control characters I found that were supported in the search and replace function.

I did manage to discover a way to remove extraneous {control M (paragraph break)}, but not how to replace ", " or tab with a paragraph break to allow sorting in Open Office Calc.

Hello,
After reading this forum, I downloaded and installed the Alternative Searching extension. I was easily able to replace carriage returns with end of paragraph characters in Writer.