Automatically remove line breaks

Hello, I have texts obtained by OCR from digitized pages of newspapers, printed in columns. These texts, once copied into WORD, appear as inconsistent or truncated lines, or empty lines, which in my opinion are line breaks justified by the column arrangement in newspaper printing. These line breaks are symbolized by a right angle arrow () (which can be obtained by "enter + shift"), sometimes with pilcrows (¶). This means that a text, which normally fits into five lines, is spread over twenty lines or more. In my experience, this issue is not specific to OCR because I have had the opportunity to convert text from HTML pages which present the same anomalies.
I am looking for the buttons or commands that allow under "WORD" to automatically rearrange these many disparate lines into few solid and full lines.
I noticed under "FORMAT" the buttons "paragraph distribution" and "two lines into one," but they are greyed out and I am unable to activate them, which may not be suitable for the Latin or complex scripts I exclusively use, but rather for East Asian scripts.
I await your ideas. Thank you