Perform Find-and-replace on clipboard before pasting

Hello all, here is my problem. Frequently I paste text from OCR'd sources. I wrote a macro to find and replace all paragraph marks within a selection (in MS Word) with spaces. So long as I don't copy more than 1 paragraph, the text wraps properly and is formatted as one paragraph, not a bunch of separate lines.

However, currently I need to:
1. copy
2. paste
3. highlight text
4. run macro

I would like to replace that with:
1. copy
2. run macro

Step 2 would have a keyboard shortcut. The macro would be my existing macro, but would operate on the clipboard contents instead of text that I have pasted and subsequently highlighted in Word.

Does anyone know how to perform a find and replace in VBA on the contents of the clipboard?

That is a good idea, but won't work because if the context (that I didn't provide above). If I did that, the macro would run the Find and Replace on my whole document (bad), not just the text that I just pasted in (my goal). Another option other than what I originally asked would be to pasted, select the text that was just pasted, and then run the find and replace operation.

Does that make sense?

OK, I'll try to clarify. I have a document that is 50 pages or so. Throughout those 50 pages, there are headings, paragraphs, and maybe images. From a OCR'd document, maybe a PDF, or maybe from a web location, I copy some text. Because it was OCR'd, when pasted straight into Word, it looks like some number of one-line paragraphs. To fix that, I first highlight the text that I just pasted, and then I run my macro to FIND and REPLACE all of the carriage returns with spaces. Then the text looks like one paragraph.

In summary:
(1) paste the clipboard
(2) highlight the text
(3) run the macro (FIND & REPLACE).

Key note: the macro is limited to operating ONLY on the text that I have highlighted.

If I skip step (2), the Find and Replace would operate on all 50 pages of text, and I'd end up with a 30 page, single-paragraph, document. That's why I "select" the text first - to limit the scope of what is affected by the macro.

I didn't think Word/VBA would "remember" what text was just pasted and re-select it, so I hoped to be able to run a macro on the clipboard contents only. Would something like this process flow work (which I don't know how to implement yet)?

(1) save clipboard contents to a string or other variable type
(2) run FIND & REPLACE on the variable
(3) paste

Does anyone out there have any ideas on this? Thanks!