Hi everyone,



So I have a 400 page document with close to 467 section breaks (some must be continuous breaks I suppose).

When I double click on the header or footer I can see the breaks (I see the section numbers from 1 to 467 and I can navigate normally using next/previous section). I want to remove all of the breaks from the document.

I have tried the find and replace for ^b (and I've already gotten rid of the page breaks). The find/replace returns 0 results. I have tried running the find/replace in the main doc and also in the footnote area (in draft view). No luck.

I have tried going to Page Layout > Page Setup > Layout and set the Section Start to New Page and applied to Whole Document. Then I repeated the find and replace (main doc in print layout view and also in draft main window, footnote window). No results.

When I display the nondisplayed formatting marks, it is very strange but I do not see any breaks (continuous or next-page breaks) shown anywhere in print layout or draft view. I format documents in Word very frequently and I have never come across this.

I have tried running a macro that I found online to delete the breaks and that didn't work either. I'm really at a loss of how to get rid of these breaks. I have no choice because I have to start the footnotes at 1 in each chapter and that is based on section breaks, and all of the breaks are causing a problem here. I have kept clean copies of the document in which I have not run the macro.

Any advice you could give would be wonderful. Thank you so much in advance for any time or ideas you can give.

What do you mean when you say What are you seeing, where?

Replacing ^b will get rid of all section breaks.

Hi Charles,

Thank you for your response. As I mentioned though, ^b does not seem to be working. I realize that it should work, and I also realize that it is not intuitive that this doesn't work.

To answer your question, when I double click on the header or footer, I see the section breaks how they normally look (there is a section number attached to each section, and the Link to Previous is set by default). Attached is a screenshot.

I am familiar with using section breaks and have been able to solve various issues with them before. This one has me stumped though. I created a video of what I'm looking at and will upload it to Youtube in a few.

Attached Images

section breaks.jpg (52.6 KB, 8 views)

Also I should add that there are no tracked changes or comments in the document and I do not have tracked changes turned on (I saw on another page that that had caused a problem for deleting breaks for someone).

I made a quick video of what I'm looking at in case it helps: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnuwNankXmk

Thank you again for your kind assistance!

Can't listen to your narration till tomorrow until tomorrow.

Thought occurs to me to select an area that you believe contains a section mark, and change the left indent. That might make it possible to see a continuous section break that is currently at the end of a line.

No problem Charles. Actually I think I have just solved it by accident. The solution was to close all of my open Word windows and open the document again. Very strange. That was driving me nuts. Thank you for taking the time to respond to my question!

On a different tack, you have an incredible number of sections. Are you by any chance changing your margins on a regular basis? This inserts a section break, an unnecessary one. It is something done by a person used to using Word Perfect. If so, try changing to a different style with paragraph indents set differently.

Or, is this a document converted from Word Perfect?

If so, the best way to make it work in Word may be to export to plain text (.txt) and then copy that text into Word. Reformat it using Styles.

Yeah I thought about plain text but I couldn't do that because I would have lost too much other important formatting. It's not my document, I'm helping someone out with this. I tried the various paste options too.

In the end, for whatever reason, Word was showing all of those sections but they weren't actually there. I've never seen that before. After closing and opening the document the sections were gone (one of the numerous things I did must have worked, I just can't believe the sections were still showing).

Anyway for future reference if anyone runs into this very whacky issue, try completely closing out of all Word windows and signing back in. Sometimes it's the simplest solution haha...