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A computer club member wrote:
“Often articles arriving on the internet are loaded with larger than ">" signs at the beginning of every line. Removing them one at a time is a tedious chore. Can they be deleted all at once? Also, the text is usually fragmented into a lot of short lines and unnecessary spaces. Are there short cuts to reformat the text?”
THE ANSWER
 The tool for addressing these issues is the Search and Replace function found within Microsoft Word and WordPad. For example, let’s assume that you receive an e-mail that looks like this:
The first step you need to do is to place your mouse cursor at the starting point where you wish to copy and edit text. Now click the left mouse button and while holding it down drag the mouse until all the text you wish to copy is selected.
Now that the text is selected, hold down the Control key at the lower left hand corner of your keyboard and depress the “C” key. This will “copy” the selected text to your Windows Clipboard (a temporary holding place).
Now start up your word processing program, Microsoft Word or WordPad, click your mouse cursor at the top of the blank page, hold down the Control key and depress the “V” key. This will “paste” the Windows Clipboard contents to your new word processing document.
Now comes the fun part. At the top menu bar in your word processing program, click on Edit and select Replace.
You will then see a dialog box come up that looks like this:
In the Find what window, type the larger than sign, >, leave the Replace With window blank and then click on Replace All. Your results should now look something like this:
To fix the line breaks, you must use Microsoft Word; this function is not available in WordPad. Again select Edit-Replace from the menu bar, but this time enter ^p in the Find what window, click on the Replace With window, tap the space bar once and then click on Replace All. You may also want to use this function to get rid of extra spaces. In the Find what window, enter two spaces, in the Replace With window enter one space and then click on Replace All. Keep clicking on Replace All until you see a dialog box that says 0 replacements made.
Once your selected text is formatted to your liking, click on Control-A to select all, Control-C to copy to the clipboard and then Control-V to paste the text into your final document.
Once you have completed all these steps, your final result should look like this:
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