Getting Rid of Section Breaks, But Not Section Formatting

Word allows you to format your documents on three levels: sections, paragraphs, and characters. Of the three, section formatting is often the most confusing formatting for people to understand. Other issues of WordTips have detailed how you can insert section breaks and apply section formatting.

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 characteristics of the section after the break. This may be what you want, but it can also be a pain if you want to delete the final section break in a document and you don't want the previous text to loose its section formatting.

Unfortunately, there is no intrinsic way to delete section breaks and maintain the formatting represented by that break. There is a workaround you can use, however:

1. Place the insertion point at the end of the document, just after the final section break.
2. If the section break just before the insertion point is a Continuous section break, press Ctrl+Enter to insert a page break.
3. Choose Header and Footer from the View menu. Word displays the Header and Footer dialog box.
4. Make sure the Same As Previous control is selected for both the header and footer. This ensures that the final section in the document has the same header and footer as the section just before it.
5. Close the Header and Footer dialog box.
6. Place the insertion point just before the section break.
7. Choose Page Setup from the File menu. Word displays the Page Setup dialog box. (Click here to see a related figure.)
8. Immediately press Enter or click on OK.
9. Place the insertion point just after the section break.
10. Press F4. Word applies the Page Setup formatting that you accepted in step 8 to the last section.
11. If there are no differences in column formatting between the two final sections, you can skip to step 18.
12. Place the insertion point just before the section break.
13. Choose Columns from the Format menu. Word displays the Columns dialog box. (Click here to see a related figure.)
14. Immediately press Enter or click on OK.
15. Place the insertion point just after the section break.
16. Press F4. Word applies the column formatting that you accepted in step 14 to the last section.
17. Select and delete the final section break.
18. Select and delete the page break you inserted in step 2.

For more information on this and other issues relating to section breaks, visit the Word MVP site at http://word.mvps.org/faqs/formatting/WorkWithSections.htm.