Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated December 27, 2021)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016
Anita is re-formatting a long document (over 300 pages) that was converted from PDF to Word. She has lots of experience with Word and styles and using Find and Replace to fix badly formatted documents. In this case there is a problem she can't figure out. The original document had horizontal lines in the header and footer that were converted to graphic lines in the Word document. She wants to delete all those graphic lines, but searching for ^g doesn't find them. Anita wonders if there is a way she can automate the removal of these graphic lines, as she'd rather not have to click and press Del 600+ times.
Since it appears that the PDF conversion process is adding the graphics to the header and footer, that means they are not easily "findable" by doing a regular Find and Replace. Instead, you'll want to use a macro to get rid of them. The following example looks only in the header and footer area and deletes any graphics that it finds there.
Sub FooterHeaderGraphicFind() Dim rStory As Range Dim i As Integer For Each rStory In ActiveDocument.StoryRanges If rStory.StoryType = wdPrimaryFooterStory Or _ rStory.StoryType = wdPrimaryHeaderStory Then For i = rStory.Shapes.Count To 1 Step -1 rStory.Shapes(i).Delete Next i End If Next rStory End Sub
Note that it deletes all the shapes in the header or footer, not just lines. (There is no way to differentiate the content of one graphic shape from another.)
Of course, there could be a much simpler way to handle the situation, without the need for a macro:
This approach should get rid of any type of graphic and formatting artifacts introduced into the document by the PDF conversion process. The result is a "clean" document that you can format any way you want. This approach is especially easy if you have implemented and can apply styles throughout the document.
Note:
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2022-01-18 12:34:52
Mona
This didn't work for me. Gave me an error on this:
Sub FooterHeaderGraphicFind()
2017-10-17 11:31:46
Alana
Woops, skip the OCR step; just realized it's a PDF converted from Word. Carry on.
2017-10-17 11:29:47
Alana
I like to temporarily crop (or save the file as same filename and adding "_cropped" at the end) the header and footer info on all pages of the PDF file, then convert text to word "OCR recognition" so that I can CTRL+A to select all for copy-paste in Word. Be sure the PDF is in Fit Page Continuous before doing CTRL+A. Hope this helps.
2017-07-01 23:20:17
Isabel Leonard
Easier still: copy the whole document to Notepad then copy it back to Word. Downside: Notepad gets rid of attributes such as bolding and italicization.
2017-07-01 04:58:21
Ken Endacott
The macro given will not work for a couple of reasons.
rStory.Shapes is invalid, it should be rStory.ShapeRange
The macro will only remove shapes from the first Section.
The following macro will remove shapes from all headers and footers in all Sections. The coding does not look intuitive because it appears to work only on the header of the first section, but it actually covers every header, footer and section.
Sub RemoveShapesInHeaderFooter()
Dim aSection As Section
Set aSection = ActiveDocument.Sections(1)
Do While aSection.Headers(wdHeaderFooterPrimary).Shapes.Count > 0
aSection.Headers(wdHeaderFooterPrimary).Shapes(1).Delete
Loop
End Sub
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