Paragraph endings and line breaks
You may occasionally run into troubles when you search/replace for line and paragraph endings in PowerPoint text.
- Paragraphs and line breaks in titles are different from other text.
- PowerPoint 2007 and later use different characters for paragraph endings compared to previous versions.
- All versions use an unusual character to represent line breaks.
First, some terminology
Paragraph endings are what PowerPoint inserts into text when you press the Enter key.
In bulleted text, this ends one bullet point and begins another.
Line breaks are what PowerPoint inserts into text when you press Shift + Enter.
In bulleted text, this forces subsequent text to appear on a new line but doesn't begin a new bullet point.
In the following table we give both the hexadecimal and ascii equivalents of the characters PowerPoint inserts in each situation.
- 0D or 13 is a Carriage Return, vbCr or Chr$(13)
- 0A or 10 is a Linefeed, vbLf or Chr$(10)
- 0D 0A or 13 10 is a Carriage Return/Linefeed (CRLF) pair, vbCRLF or Chr$(13) & Chr$(10)
- 0B or 11 is a non-printable character, Chr$(11)
Table of paragraph/line break characters used by PowerPoint
Text | Character | 97 - 2003 | 2007 and later |
Title | Line break | 0B / 11 | 0B / 11 |
Title | Paragraph break | 0B / 11 | 0B / 11 | Other text | Line break | 0B / 11 | 0B / 11 |
Other text | Paragraph break | 0D 0A / 13 10 | 0D / 13 |