I have a document, the contents of which were cut and paste into a
"New" Document of Microsoft Word 2002.  The problem is that once I
pasted the text into it this new document each line of the body of
this text must have line breaks at the end of the line way before they
should Example:

Text looks like this on each line.
Text should continue all the way to the end of right margin and then
wrapped down to next line automatically as it has here.

   So, my question is how do I get MS Word to automatically reformat
the complete body of the text so that all the embedded line-breaks are
effectively removed from each line and they wrap as they should
smoothly till the end of the paragraph?

Hello, its2die4,

When you copy and paste from one type of document (say .txt or .html)
to Word, the Word application often reads the original end-of-line as
a carriage return or paragraph break and starts a new paragraph.  You
need to find and remove this paragraph break coding.

This is easy, if you have pasted a single paragraph into your Word
document, slightly more complicated if you have lots of paragraphs.

Before you make any changes, save your document once, then save it
again with a slightly different name, and work on version 2.  If
things start happening that you don't like, it's easy to revert to
your original paste-up.  Don't forget to save as yet again before you
have another go.

Okay, single paragraph first  :

Go to Edit >> Find and Replace.  In the Find What box type "^p"
(without the inverted commas; in the Replace With box type " " (no
inverted commas, just a single blank space.  Then click on Replace
All, and all those end-of-line markers will be replaced by a blank
space and the words will wrap to the margin.

Now the multiple paragraphs:

Now it gets more complicated, because some of your paragraph markers
are genuine, and some - the line endings - are not.
What you have to do is to find the genuine paragraph markers, replace
them temporarily with some bogus code, change the remaining paragraph
markers to blank spaces, then change the bogus coding back to real
paragraph markers.

Ready?

1.  Edit >> Find and Replace

2.  Replace "^p^p" with "&&&&&&&%%%%%%%" (but don't use the inverted
commas)

3.  Replace "^p" with " " (blank space - but don't use the inverted
commas)

4.  Replace "&&&&&&&%%%%%%%" with ^p^p.

That should do it for you - but if it doesn't, or you need further
clarification, please get back to me before rating this answer!

Best,  r2l

Try selecting all text to be affected and Format-Word Wrap.

omniscientbeing-ga
Google Answers Researcher

Format -> AutoFormat will solve this and many other things, if you're
willing for those changes to be made. (For instance, it replaces
straight quotes with "smart quotes" - those that curve inward or
outward according to whether they are at the end or the beginning of a
phrase or word.)