Shelley is developing a macro that changes all capitalization permutations of "provided that" ("Provided That", "PROVIDED THAT", etc.) to lowercase. That is easy enough to do, but if the phrase starts a sentence the "P" should be capitalized. Shelley wonders if there is a way, in a macro, to tell if a phrase such as "provided that" is at the beginning of a sentence.
There are a couple of ways you could go about this. First, you could use Find and Replace to do successive searches and replacements. The macro could do the following:
Since this is being done in a macro, the process should go very quickly. Here's an example of one that could do the job:
Sub ChangeCase1() Dim vFindText As Variant Dim vReplaceText As Variant Dim orng As Range Dim i As Long vFindText = Array(". provided that", _ "! provided that", _ "? provided that", _ "."" provided that", _ "!"" provided that", _ "?"" provided that") vReplaceText = Array(". Provided that", _ "! Provided that", _ "? Provided that", _ "."" Provided that", _ "!"" Provided that", _ "?"" Provided that") ' Set all occurrences to lowercase Set orng = ActiveDocument.Range With orng.Find .ClearFormatting .Replacement.ClearFormatting Do While .Execute(FindText:="provided that", _ Forward:=True, _ Wrap:=wdFindStop) = True orng.Select orng = "provided that" orng.Collapse wdCollapseEnd Loop End With ' Account for end-of-sentence For i = 0 To UBound(vFindText) Set orng = ActiveDocument.Range With orng.Find .ClearFormatting .Replacement.ClearFormatting Do While .Execute(FindText:=vFindText(i), _ MatchCase:=True, _ Forward:=True, _ Wrap:=wdFindStop) = True orng.Select orng = vReplaceText(i) orng.Collapse wdCollapseEnd Loop End With Next End Sub
One shortcoming to this approach is that it doesn't allow for "provided that" occurring at the beginning of a paragraph. The macro could be modified to make it take such instances into account, but it would be more complex.
There is a different approach you can use, however. This one relies on a rather esoteric setting for the Case property: wdTitleSentence. This setting changes all the characters (with one notable exception) to lowercase and if the phrase is at the beginning of a sentence will change the first character to uppercase. Here's how you could use it in a macro:
Sub ChangeCase2() With Selection.Find .ClearFormatting .Wrap = wdFindContinue .Forward = True .Format = True .MatchCase = False .MatchWildcards = False .Text = "provided that" .Execute While .Found Selection.Range.Case = wdLowerCase Selection.Range.Case = wdTitleSentence Selection.Collapse Direction:=wdCollapseEnd .Execute Wend End With End Sub
Important! that within the While loop there are two assignments made to the Case property. The first sets the selection (what was found) to lowercase and the second sets it to title case for a sentence. The lowercase setting is made specific to handle the "one notable exception" I mentioned—if the text "PROVIDED that" is at the beginning of a sentence, the wdTitleSentence setting will not, for some reason, change it to "Provided that." It will, however, change "provided that" (which "PROVIDED that" becomes after setting it to lowercase) to "Provided that" with no problem.
Note:
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2015-08-20 22:54:09
Ken Endacott
The Find and Replace settings to replace multiple spaces with a single space are:
Find what: [^32]{2,}
Replace with: ^32
You may also want to remove any spaces before a paragraph mark. The settings are:
Find what: [^32]{1,}^13
Replace with: ^p
2015-08-20 10:01:18
awyatt
Von: Easiest way is to use Find and Replace. Simply search for a period followed by two spaces and replace it with a period followed by one space.
Repeat the same process for any other sentence-ending punctuation you may use in the document.
-Allen
2015-08-20 08:47:58
Von Jones
How can someone delete two spaces between sentences in a document and replace them with one? I ask this question because I came from the old school where two spaces between sentences was required. I submitted a 85,000 word manuscript to an editor but my work was rejected because I used the two-space rule. It is a hard job to go through the entire document removing spaces.
Thanks
Vondell (Von) Jones
2015-08-18 09:11:12
Ken Endacott
In Word VBA a sentence is theoretically a string of characters ending in one (or several contiguous) special punctuation characters question mark, exclamation mark, period or paragraph mark. The sentence includes the punctuation character and any trailing spaces. Thus text such as "Smith et al. authors" would be regarded as two sentences. But not if there is a comma following the period!
Word does strange things with sentences is if the punctuation is not straight forward. Things that upset it are ? or ! in the middle of a word for example peop!e, a word ending with ., such as etc., or a period inside a closing quotation mark for example people.". In these cases the string containing the offending characters is not a member of the Sentences collection and cannot be accessed with statements such as:
Strng = Activedocument.Sentences(n)
What this means is that the macros will work for most cases but there may be circumstances where there are some unintended results. Preferably clean up all punctuation anomalies before running the macro.
2015-08-17 10:59:39
Malcolm
The proposed macro solution does not address periods that appear in the middle of a sentence, which would include instances of abbreviations like Inc., Corp., etc., et al.
Note that the latter period here *is* at the end of a sentence (albeit a contrived one) even though it would otherwise be required for the abbreviation of "alii."
2015-08-15 06:13:23
Ken Endacott
Rather than test for sentence ending punctuation marks there is a much simpler way of determining if the selected text is at the start of a sentence:
If Selection.Start = Selection.Sentences(1).Start Then
,, ,, ,,
End If
This method will also work if there is more than one space between sentences.
One thing to note is that changing case whether by using SHIFT/F3 or with the VBA Case statements does not show as a revision in Track Changes. This is a shortcoming because it is usually desirable to show all editing changes in a document.
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