Forum Discussion
Simply cannot delete a section break. It is impossible. Cannot be done. Please prove me wrong.
After screaming at the computer to die and having tried every option from Word and Google to no avail, I finally found one thing that worked but also destroyed all formatting as a result. I pressed enter/return before the section break (next page), moved my cursor to the left margin, and then highlighted the section break and deleted it. Both header and footer were removed along with all formatting of paragraphs. At that point, I did not give a flying foopity-foo because I had successfully removed the dad-blasted section break. I simply reformatted, which definitely took less time than trying to fix something so stupidly simple and yet so irritatingly complicated. I swear, if I knew anything about programming and coding, I would create a better word processing software that would outstrip Microsoft and their stupid foopity-foo Word. Alas, I cannot and thus am relegated to continue screaming at my computer every time, and I do mean EVERY TIME, I sit down to write in Word.
Victoria, if you delete a section break, the section formatting (columns, paper size, orientation, margins, headers, footers & page numbers) from the subsequent section are applied to the section above. This is the opposite of what I would logically expect, but it's how Word has always worked. Thus, if you delete a section break and your headers & footers disappear, then those headers and footers simply weren't in the subsequent section and when you deleted the break, that formatting took over the previous section that existed before you removed the break. If I want to delete a section break and ensure that the headers/footers stay intact, I just make sure that that same section formatting is present in the section below before deleting the break. That's pretty easily done by going into the header of the subsequent section (before deleting the break) and clicking the LINK TO PREVIOUS button on the Header & Footer tab. That will cause the header for the subsequent section to match whatever is going on in the previous section. Do the same thing for the footer, and THEN delete the break. Hope that helps. The bigger question is how section breaks are creeping into your document if you didn't insert them yourself. They don't show up uninvited. They have to be manually added or copied/pasted in from another document. If you convert from PDF to Word using any of the main PDF programs like Acrobat, they will drop unwanted section breaks at the bottom of every page. The same is true if you allow Word to convert a document from WordPerfect. So it might be something in your workflow which is re-creating this issue.