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joanmurray Author

Level 1

5 points

find and replace special characters pages v. 11.2

This question has been asked and "solved" recently, but the solution does not work for me. I am try to replace a paragraph mark \p with a tab \t and have used the "use selection for find" and "use selection for replace" workaround as suggested previously. This enters the correct find and replace strings (\p and \t) in the dialogue box, but the "Replace All" "Replace and Find" and "Replace" buttons are greyed out, and the forward and back arrows also inoperative. So what do I need to do? I want to convert text to table, and need to replace paragraphs with tabs in order to do so.

I have to say, Pages is a rubbish app compared to Word and gets worse every time it is upgraded.

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 11.2

Posted on Jan 24, 2022 1:54 PM

Top-ranking reply

VikingOSX

Community+ 2024

Level 10

116,813 points

Posted on Jan 24, 2022 3:48 PM

There is no \p code in Pages Find/Replace to denote paragraph marks. It understands \n for the pilcrow (¶) mark which is actually a newline character. Unfortunately, Pages will find and replace every paragraph mark in the entire document with a tab unless you limit the find/replace scope by clicking > to advance to the next paragraph mark and click Replace.

If you want that content in tabular form, you must manually backspace every paragraph mark around that data and replace it with a tab, then copy/paste that line of tab-separated text in the first single-clicked cell of an inserted table.

Pages has never been designed as a Word clone, nor is Apple attempting to compete with any other word processing application, much less Word. If you need Word features, then use Word, and you won't have to loathe missing Word features in Pages.

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find and replace special characters pages v. 11.2

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