When you paste text into Word sometimes you can end up with odd line breaks. This problem often happens when you are copying and pasting from an email, for example. Instead of coming in as a complete line like this:
"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’s back."
The text is broken up like this:
"The quick brown fox
jumped over the lazy
dog’s back."
In other words, although the margins may be set to stretch across the page, the text does not. Many people will laboriously fix the problem line by line, but it’s a tedious process.
The problem has to do with extra line breaks, not the margins. In some cases, you can use Word’s Autoformat to reformat the lines. Highlight the text and choose Format|Autoformat. However, depending on where the text was copied from, this approach doesn’t always work.
If you turn on paragraph markers, you can tell what is causing the text to break. Choose Tools|Options and in the View tab, click Paragraphs and Tabs. If the lines have line breaks at the end of each line, you’ll see little left pointed arrows. If they are paragraph breaks, you’ll see the pilcrow character, which looks like a backwards P.
To get rid of the breaks, you can do a find and replace. If the markers are showing line breaks at the end of each line, you can find them by putting ^l (a lowercase letter L) in the Find What box. If they are paragraph markers, put ^p in the Find What box.
In the Replace box, simply type a space and then click Find Next. As you go through the document, you will remove the unwanted breaks. The text will span the entire width of the page.