Reset a manual hyphenated document to 'no hyphenation'

Hi Andreas.

I would start with a wildcard Find and Replace:
Find: ([a-z]{1,})-([a-z]{1,})
Replace: \1\2

Hi graham, thanks for the qick answer, I understand the expressions and will test it in a while.

So there is no built-in version to 'unhyphen' a maually hyphenated document?  If I say manually hyphenated, I actually mean the built-in manual hyphenation functionality

You can also choose from the hyphen character options via the Special button in the Find and Replace dialogue. The hyphen that allows a word to break across a line is the  the 'Optional Hyphen'

Is it possible to attach a paragraph in a word doc for testing?

Hi Graham,

your expression only searches for hyphenated words such as pick-up or good-hearted. It does not search for hyphens at the end of line.  This is a strange behaviour isn't it?

I slightly changed you code to  <([a-z]{1,})-([a-z]{1,}) to better suit my needs.

So what do you think?

Regards, Andreas

Hi OM,

here we are :-)

thank you
manually_hyphenated_dummy_text.docx

Hi Eric,

great post from your side, thank you very much for it.  

I was aware that the manual hyphenation procedure produces 'optional hyphens' . And I thought there would be some built-in command that  gets rid of all these optional hyphens in one go. A button that I 'was too blind' to find. Ok, there is no such button :-)

I wasn't thinking of this special  replace feature. Great that you brought this to my attention. Thank you very much for it.

Dear all,

thank you to both of you Graham and Eric.

Thanks Andreas!

I know what you mean about possible "hidden" buttons or features, but here's a tip I find useful: right-click in the ribbon area to choose Customize the Ribbon. Then, choose "All commands" from the left column to get an alphabetical list of all possible commands in Word. You can click in the column and type the 1st character to jump into the list instead of having to scroll (it is a LONG list!). Navigate to a custom group in the right column and use Add to add it to the group. You can rename the command and assign an icon if you want.

I have several custom groups, so if the explanation when I hover over a command isn't clear, I just add it to a custom group temporarily so I can test it.

I've found many useful features I didn't even know about this way: for example, for a recent book, I needed to crop all pictures to a 16:9 aspect ratio. Getting it right is hard to estimate, and using the Aspect Ratio flyout tab takes extra steps, so I added the "16:9" button to a custom group in my Picture Tools ribbon. Now when I want to crop an image to 16:9, I just click the button and use Shift-Drag on a corner to crop while keeping the 16:9 aspect ration. Very handy!

BTW, I checked for your hyphenation question, but sadly there is no hidden command available to remove optional hyphens. You could create a macro though, and add it to a custom group if you need it regularly...

Hi Eric,

thank you very much for your insights into these matters. Really helpful. :-)