(solved) Word: Hard page breaks

A friend of mine has put hard page breaks in a long Word document, and now we can't figure out how to remove them. Word Help says to go to Normal View, select the manual page break, and then hit Delete. Fine. I can delete the line BEFORE the manual page break, which removes the page break and moves it down to where it ought to be, BUT as soon as I try to insert a line back at that spot, the manual page break pops back in again. How can I get rid of it permanently? There are others...

 

EB--sounds more like you're deleting section breaks instead. Don't bother with normal view--it stinks. Use page layout (97) or print layout (2K) view.

Hit the show/hide button. (Looks like a backwards P on the upper toolbar; if using 2K, you may need to hit the >> button to see all items on the toolbar.

That will show you page breaks, but there can be problems. If your page break was inserted at the end of a line that ends near the right-hand margin, it may be difficult to see.

You can always use Find/Replace and replace all the manual page breaks with paragraph returns.

Enter this in the find box:

^m

Enter this in the replace with box:

^p

(Entries must be lower-case letters or they won't work) Hit replace all.

Perhaps they aren't page breaks, but are Next-Page section breaks. In which case you can hit ctrl-a, hit File-Page setup, hit the Layout tab, choose section start "new page". Close the page setup dialog. Then, do a find/replace.

Find:

^b

Replace with:

^p

But don't blame me if your formatting gets all hosed up 'cause you're deleting section breaks, okay?

Good luck with it. If you run into any major problems, email the doc to [email protected]

 

Thanks, Dreamboat! She sent me a chapter as an attached file, so I can play with it until it works. I'll report back my success. Happy New Year!

 

And to you too! Good luck.

 

EBS sent me a sample file. The "dotted" line turned out to be borders applied intermittently throughout the document, at the bottom of some pages. Hitting ctrl-a, then Format-Borders and Shading, Borders tab, and choosing None, will get rid of all borders in a document.

Happy new year!

 

The black dotted line is gone! Thanks so much for the help, Dreamboat. Who would have thought it was a border problem???