I'm working with a document that has completely screwy section breaks. I can find and remove or change both continuous and next page section breaks, and if I add a section break, it shows up in the formatting as expected and the numbers adjust accordingly, so the basics seem to be working properly. However, even when there is no section break apparent in the formatting, the header/footer section numbers skip forward every so often; sections 2 and 4 are on consecutive pages, and I can't find any formatting to explain it.
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Jan 27, 2017 - If you have worked with sections before, you already know that if you delete a section break, the text before the break then adopts the section. Short video showing how to delete a section (or page) break in Word on Mac (Apple) (example is a.
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Sections 13 and 30 are similarly connected. I finally did a find and replace to remove ALL section breaks, planning to add back in the 2 sections I actually want. Word confirms it can't find any additional section breaks (either through advanced find and replace or through the 'next section' button in the header/footer ribbon).
Yet the footer on the last document page says section 45 and claims to be page 192 of a 137 page document. I scrolled back up a bit: document page 113 is in section 13, and document page 114 is in section 30. The revealed formatting shows only paragraph breaks, which I guess are somehow concealing 17 sections. I really just need two sections-it does not need to be a complex document. But there's a lot of fine-tuned formatting already in place that I want to hold onto if I can.
Any Jedi section-break-revealing ideas? Thanks to a comment about hidden text, I was reminded of a known problem with track changes and automatic ToC/ lists of tables: sometimes even if you are looking at the final version (no markup), it will skip some entries no matter how many times you redo the field codes, so a list of tables will include 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 11. Once you accept all changes, if you autoupdate the list again, it will be correct. With that in mind, I accepted all changes, and lo and behold the section breaks were corrected. I made no new changes, but the document structure finally reflected what the formatting codes said should have been there all along. There must be some logic as to which changes Word implements at which stage of the process, but it seems pretty arbitrary to me. Thanks again!
I had a similar problem with section breaks embedded in the body of the page. They would either remain after appearing to be deleted, or they were invisible entirely. Eventually, I discovered a solution for deleting them individually (I really didn't want to delete all section breaks in the document). First, locate the page where the section break occurs. Then copy the text of the entire page into a text editor to strip out all the formatting.
Then copy that and paste it back into the document over the original text. The section break should be gone. I solved what may be a similar problem related to a sudden page numbering change, whereby page 13 was followed by page 2.
I couldn't find a way to make it follow the previous page number, but noticed that the sections marked in the header & footer skipped suddenly from Section 6 to Section 8. I finally realized that I'd inserted a couple of Continuous Section Breaks to allow me to have a piece of text in two columns rather than one. Once I removed the continuous breaks the pagination reverted to normal (I placed the 2-column text in a table instead). Hope this helps.
Enjoy, Tony Actually, you CAN do what the OP is asking. To do so, select an area just above the section break, then click File Page Setup (or File-Print-Page Setup in Word 2010). Then click on each of the three tabs (don't change any settings) then click OK. Now, click just after the section break and press F4. This will copy the formatting from the area above the section break, to the area below the section break. You can then safely delete the section break as per: HTH.
As has been discussed, deleting a Section break causes the Section preceding the break to assume the page layout of the following Section. The following macro works the other way, across multiple (selected) Section breaks. All common page layout issues (margins, page orientation, text columns, headers & footers) are addressed. If you're referring to the approach suggested by markey165 on November 30, 2011, do be aware that it does not work for the original poster's requirements, which included preserving header & footer content from the preceding Section - which may or may not be linked to the Section before that. All that approach does is to replicate the basic page layout. The macro I posted on November 06, 2013 both replicates the page layout and preserves the header & footer content from the preceding Section, plus it allows you to merge more than one Section at a time. Cheers Paul Edstein MS MVP - Word.
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