Removing Breaks

To remove all dotted lines, go to draft view, select all your text, cut it, and past it again (in draft view they will be removed). Thanks to Allen Wyatt for that tip.

Thank you so much Jennifer Thomas and Allen, for your tips. These were useful.

Srivani,

The following tip should answer your question:

http://wordribbon.tips.net/T009500

-Allen

srivani a - the formatting result is determined by where your insertion point is when you remove the page break because the removal applies the style of the paragraph that contains your insertion point to the paragraph that follows the page break.

Consider that if you insert a page break with the insertion point in a numbered list, Word inserts an empty paragraph with the numbered list formatting applied (it moves the formatting down).

It works the other way too; if your insertion point is within the page break when you delete, the following paragraph will take on the style of the page break (it moves the formatting up).

So the real trick it to pay attention to where the insertion point is when you delete - try it out with the insertion point in different paragraphs & you'll see what I mean! Hope that helps.

When ever i try to remove page breaks, the formatting especially with regard to ordered and unordered list in the entire section goes haywire. How do i remove the page breaks without any unwanted change in the formatting?

Thanks for pointing that out, Dr. Bartolo!

To others that want to use Replace to remove breaks, be aware that 'section breaks'in the special formatting list = ALL break types (including continuous breaks, which can mess up column formatting).

To remove only certain break types, use a macro similar to this (this is for removing only continuous section breaks from selected areas, so just change 'wdSectionContinuous' to whatever type you want):

Sub RemoveSectionBreaksContinuousSelection()

Dim i As Long
Dim sb As Range

' This works only if you have selected text first - this checks for a selected range.

If Selection.Start = Selection.End Then
MsgBox "Select the desired range of text (or press Ctrl+A to select the whole document), then run this macro again."
Exit Sub
End If

'This searches the selection for continuous section breaks and removes them

With Selection
For i = .Sections.Count To 2 Step -1
With .Sections(i)
If .PageSetup.SectionStart = wdSectionContinuous Then
.PageSetup.SectionStart = ActiveDocument.Sections(i - 1).PageSetup.SectionStart
Set sb = Selection.Sections(i - 1).Range
sb.End = sb.End - 1
sb.Collapse wdCollapseEnd
sb.Delete
End If
End With
Next i
End With

End Sub

This tip could go on to cover two other issues. The first is that you can use search and replace to find various types of break (such as page breaks) and remove or replace them. The "special" drop-down list in the search and replace dialogue box contains the character codes needed to search for these in "search", while "replace" just needs to be left blank (to remove a break) or completed with a different code (to replace it).

The second point is that even in Draft view page breaks cannot be seen in the way described in this tip (at least not in Word 2010) unless a special option to do so is first applied. This is called "split apart page break and paragraph mark", and is available in the "layout options" section at the end of the advanced area in "File" "Options" (again for Word 2010).