Can I view and remove hard returns and how to reformat?

[Carmelanirel]

I originally had written a story in Word 2007 and saved it on my flash drive. I lost Word when my computer crashed, but I had borrowed a computer with Word to convert it into RTF so I could open it with LibreOffice that I downloaded.
I found out that where I am submitting this story, I need to remove the hard returns and so far I only see where to view and remove them using Microsoft Word. I again borrowed a computer to view and remove the hard returns and noticed it removed all the spaces and indents. I thought no big deal, I can reformat it on my computer.
Here is where I came across a problem. When I hold down the “shift” key and then “enter” (to create a soft return) it doesn’t indent and I find the last sentence of each paragraph is hanging, I can’t correct that either.

So I have three questions I really hope someone can answer for me.

1. Can I view hard returns in LibreOffice?

2. Is it possible to remove hard returns in LibreOffice (I am asking this because I have the original copy with the hard returns.)

3. After removing the hard returns, how can I reformat my indents and remove the handing format? (Going to format>paragraph doesn’t work, it shows the correct dimensions, but it isn’t showing on my document)

Thank you

[ROSt53]

@Carmelanirel

You can open doc, and docx formation directly with Writer, thus no need to go though rtf format.

Viewing hard returns in Writer: View > Non printing characters or ctrl-f10

You can remove hard returns: Manually or ctrl+h and then open Other Options. Most likely the menu Regular Expressions or Search for Paragraph Styles will help you further.

Reformat indents: Depending on what you get already with ctrl+h you also can indentify the paragraph style which is transfered over from Word. Modify the paragraph style and click Apply. Then all paragraphs based on this style are changed in one shot. To see the format: f11 or Format > Styles and Formatting.

[Carmelanirel]

Thank you, I was able to view the hard returns, but it looks like I have to remove them manually because when I tried " ctrl+h and then open Other Options." it didn’t do anything, even when I went to “Regular Expressions or Search for Paragraph Styles” it didn’t help. Since it will take me a while to do this, I will come back to it later this weekend and might have a question once I am finished to correct the formatting.

[Carmelanirel]

Okay, I tried moving them manually and could only remove some.