Use word, Find & replace to remove date and time

Question

I have a massive recorded calls word document where calls are scripted out for our records. The program we use has added the date and time in front of EVERY line of text so its a very clunky record and all the lines have been exported so they are one huge paragraph of text rather than separate lines so they are appearing like this:

25/09/2019 17:42:12 - Caller has requested support for device. 25/09/2019 17:42:50 - Adviser has asked for more specific details on the issue.

I need to get each line on it's own line and remove the date and time from the beginning of each line to be left with something looking more like this:

• Caller has requested support for device.
• Adviser has asked for more specific details on the issue.

Any help will be hugely appreciated! :)

Answer 1

I assume you are using Microsoft Word. And all of your Text looks exactly like the examples you posted.

Simple but functional solution:

Click on the "Replace" button at the far right of the "Home" tab. This opens the "Find and Replace" feature.

Find: .

Replace with: .^l

Click on "Replace All". This should create linebreaks after each sentence.

Now make sure the "Replace with" field is completely empty. Leaving it like that, will simply delete whatever you put into the "Find" field. Do "Replace all" for 0-9, / and :

You will probably also need to replace " "(double space), or whatever you want to remove at the beginning of each sentence. Of course you cannot remove " "(single space).

If anything goes wrong, just use the "Undo" function.

Answer 2

My workaround is to replace all time information is via Word (shown as follows)

Find using Wildcards

\: \(*\)

Word to downplay Date and Time Info: