Posts

Showing posts with the label G Suite

Using Find and Replace in LibreOffice Writer to Clean up Converted Text Documents in any Platform

Image
If your work involves converting documents, and after the conversion you need to do a lot of Find and Replace to clean up the converted document, you might have found yourself needing to use Regular Expressions. Trying to use Regex in MS Word or Google Docs is a frustrating mess unless you are, perhaps, a developer. For the everyday user at work or home (WFH), trying to figure out Regex in the MS or G Suite environment is a mess, even if you use one of the Find and Replace G Suite add-ons.  You can use Regular Expressions (Regex) to find and replace empty paragraphs; multiple, contiguous empty spaces; empty spaces at the beginning of a paragraph; etc. As someone who works almost exclusively in a Linux environment, and whose work requires the conversion of hundreds of pdf, txt, and epub documents to .docx and .odt formats, my favorite (and only really useful) hack is to use LibreOffice and its far-superior-to-MS Word and G Suite "Find & Replace" function.  The first step i