How do I remove some section breaks?

Copper Contributor

I have been preparing a book manuscript. It has some footnotes, and I turned each of 23 chapters into a section and set the footnote counter to restart with every section. This worked fine. (All this is from Office 2013 by the way, running on a PC desktop.)  Now, however, I have consolidated some chapters--and I have too many section breaks.  I don't know how to remove the ones I don't want any more. Help! Thanks in advance.

1 Reply

@KaiserD2 

 

First, turn on display of non-printing formatting marks.

 

Second, work with a COPY of your document. Section breaks can contain a lot of formmating for the section preceding the mark.

 

Third, you can generally see section breaks better when working in Draft view.

 

See my writing on When to Use Section Breaks in Microsoft Word, and When Not to.

 

Remember that the section break contains the formatting for the section preceding the break, not the one following it.

 

I would recommend deleting a section break and viewing the document in print view. Pay attention to the headers and footers. If everything looks good, .proceed to the next one you want to delete. Save your copy after each deletion has been approved.

 

You can remove all section breaks within a document using the replace feature and replacing ^b with ^p. You can do this using the Replace button to do it one at a time and skip ones you do not want to delete using the Find Next button.