G'Day Enigma,
I think it's probably not a good idea to use the term 'hard return' - it has
connotations of ASCII terminals and 'text' files with 'end of line' that might
be a CR, a LF, a CR/LF pair or a LF/CR pair - depending on the operating
system standard and/or the software creating/editing the file.
Visual Basic for Applications provides the following constants:
vbCr
vbLf
vbCrLf (and others such as vbTab and vbFormFeed)
to meet special needs.
Word has a system of 'breaks', of which the following are relevant:
Paragraph Marker Enter
Line break Shift+Enter
Page Break Ctrl+Enter......
There are also Section breaks, Column breaks and, for HTML pages, Text
Wrapping breaks.