I'm pretty sure you can search-and-replace them. Click on "More" in the search and replace box, and section breaks will be an available 'Special' character.
Oh, that's much better than my advice to copy and paste everything but the section breaks into a new document.
You need to show invisibles by clicking on the Show/Hide button in the toolbar. (You should have the button in your toolbar, unless you've fiddled with the defaults.) Then you'll see the section break in the text, and you can delete it (like you would any character).
Some options:
control z until you go back to before that time. Save as a text document and lose THIS formatting and all other kinds. Or, cut and paste what you want from this document into a new doc, leave behind the affected sections, and abandon this document. that has been my experience; others may know better.
Smasher, you don't understand the depths of my misery. Deleting the thing has no effect. It remains unscathed, like the Five Chinese Brothers. Help me. Please, I beg you, help me.
Oh, that's much better than my advice to copy and paste everything but the section breaks into a new document.
If you go this route, which you'll probably need to do if neither LB nor my advice pans out, paste first into Text and then C&P back into a new Word doc to lose all formatting.
Huh. What happened? Didn't find, or refused to replace?
The next thing I'd try is putting in some blank lines before and after, and then cutting and pasting some blank lines over the area from before the s-b to after it, if you see what I mean. If that doesn't work, then I think W/D has it -- paste everything up to the s-b into a fresh doc, then everything after it.
FL, try this. Do the show/hide thing that Smasher said, so the section break shows. Place your cursor right before the section break, and then do shift+right arrow. Hit delete.
Does that work? I just tried it, and it did.
Is Track Changes turned on? If so, turn that shit off (and never turn it on again).
Does anyone else see how outrageous this is? I CANNOT REMOVE THESE BLACK DOTS. They were put there by motherfucking Word trying to HELP, for the love of God. Now they're taking over the document like the magical brooms in Fantasia. Motherfuckers.
You can also try cutting the paragraphs above and below the break out of the document, which hopefully will remove the break. Next, Paste Special (without formatting) the text you cut. This should give you the text without the section break or any other formatting. Now just fix the formatting.
It's sounding as if something bad may have happened to the formatting of the document in some global sense.
Give it up and cut&paste into a fresh doc. If you want to be extra secure, cut and paste special as unformatted text.
Have you quit Word, then re-opened the document? Sometimes that makes aberrant behavior stop.
FL, save the document, close Word, and open it again. I'm section-breaking documents all over the place here, and I can't reproduce your error.
I CANNOT REMOVE THESE BLACK DOTS.
Which black dots? Try turning off the show/hide setting (I find it much much better on, but there are tender souls who find it distracting).
I was totally going to make fun of you, Labs, but apparently you're not alone.
You can send me the doc, if you want.
I think he means the black dots that signal the section break.
Labs sounds like he's in too deep for Paste Special. The only way to say good riddance to Section Break nightmares is to C&P that section into Text first. Also, make sure Track Changes is turned off.
Nothing is helping.
Here is the deal: what I'm talking about is a row of small black squares. They are visible with or without the visible formatting. They were produced by autocorrect responding to '***' and they won't go away. When formatting is visible, there is no "section break" thingy in grey. It's just the black dots.
Also, there are now insects crawling under my skin.
This could be a good thread.
My favorite thing that Word does is that when I paste in something containing a variety of fonts, and then use backspace or delete to remove some extraneous stuff, it makes everything AFTER the backspace the same font and size as the text BEFORE the backspace.
It's especially helpful when this happens whenever I try to delete unnecessary line breaks between a news article and its headline. This generally leads to an entire news article, which had been in 10-point Arial or something, suddenly being in 18-point bold italics to match its headline.
I cannot figure out any way to cut and paste news articles from websites and then remove extraneous lines between the headline and the body without this happening. The only thing I've figured out that cures it is creating a blank table, and then moving it to be square with the paragraph. This usually gets rid of the extraneous line breaks. I have no idea what is going on.
Meetup in Redmond! Bring pitchforks, gasoline, and perhaps a small guillotine.
It's mildly humorous that that last comment got the kitten. At least to me.
Oh, that isn't a section break, not that I know what it is. Have you tried turning on the visible formatting, and then deleting any nearby paragraph marks? Word hides all sorts of evil in the paragraph marks.
Maybe I'm not understanding you, and this is a totally off-base suggestion, but does it go away if you change the view to normal layout or print layout or something else?
The *** thing formats to a row of black squares, but I don't think that's a section break.
I keep saying Text when I mean Notepad. Notepad is your best friend when you're using Word. If Word is generating formatting problems, Word's un-format options may not help.
re 15 and 18
I have many times had secretaries and other lawyers tell me that if I get tired of being a lawyer I should be a secretary because (except for my spelling) I have, in the words of my former colleague, LizardBreath, mad secretarial skillz. I try to take it as a compliment, but one can't help wondering if this really is a comment on my lawyering skills.
To echo ogged's offer, if you want, get my e-mail address from LizardBreath and I will see if I can fix it for you.
Oh good Lord. Pasting an apparently clean section of text into a new document produces a row of these dots that wasn't in the original. I cannot believe this is happening.
Idealist really is a wizard -- if you want me to forward the doc to him, I bet he can heal it. Barring that, Armsmasher's Notepad advice is solid.
What is this thing? Four hundred pages of irreplaceable formatting, or something that can be easily reformatted if you can save the text?
Can we take bets on how many comments will be posted before somebody advises Labs to use LaTeX or similar? (One of the things I like about writing code is that the formatting consists mainly of tabs and carriage returns and is pretty solidly under my control.)
AAAAAAAAAHHHH You need a Mac you idiot
AAAAAAAAAHHHH Start using LaTeX you idiot
Then get back to me.
The squares mean your computer is sentient and trying to talk to you.
When I do the *** it autotexts into something it calls a "Border Line". I don't think you're trying to get rid of a section break; I think you're trying to get rid of a border line. That may help your googling.
Wow -- it totally works like Labs said. I just tried it. There is no way to make the squares go away, they are a permanent feature of the document now. Pretty tho.
Is Track Changes turned on? If so, turn that shit off (and never turn it on again).
You, sir, obviously do not work in Corporate America.
I haven't read the current edition of this book, but the edition that covered Word 97 was quite useful.
I just deleted a 'border line.' They go away. The differential diagnosis says: Labs' computer has the hiccups.
Try:
What you're seeing is not a line of characters or even a drawing object. Rather, it's a border. By default, if you enter three or more hyphens (-), underscores (_), equal signs (=), or asterisks (*) followed by a carriage return, Word automatically gives the current paragraph a thin, thick, double, or dotted bottom border. You must have done this accidentally.
To get rid of the line, put the cursor directly above it and select Borders and Shading from the Format menu. Click the None box and click OK. To prevent the automatic insertion of borders, select AutoCorrect Options from the Tools menu, click the AutoFormat As You Type tab, and uncheck Border lines. In Word 97, the menu item is AutoCorrect and the check box is labeled simply Borders.
Okay, that's different. Turn on invisibles (Show/Hide [paragraph symbol]) and place your cursor on the paragraph immediately above the dotted line; click on Format -> Border/Shading, and make sure that no border is selected. Then do the same on the line of text ("Leaving the details").
FL, if you go to Tools menu, then Auto Correct Options, then AutoCorrect As You Type, is the "Border lines" option selected? If so, turn it off.
That will ensure that future *** will not get turned into that infuriating row of black squares.
This looks like it might help:
http://word.mvps.org/faqs/formatting/CantGetRidOfLine.htm
In my version of Word, I can go to Format, Styles and Formatting, select the "style" of the border line, and delete it. That gets rid of *all* the borderlines in your document. And then, in the autoformat as you type options, you can keep it from happening again.
I cannot figure out any way to cut and paste news articles from websites and then remove extraneous lines between the headline and the body without this happening.
I can't help you, but FYI what I do with news articles is to go to the "Printer-Friendly" version on the web, before I copy and paste. Then after I paste, I hit select-all and choose some nice boring font and size (TNR 12 pt or whatever) to standardized the whole article. Since I don't care about having a headline as headline, this works fine.
In my defense, I thought the thing was a section break because when I attempted to insert a section break, I got a section break AND a border; I then thought I'd confirmed my suspicion that the object in question was a section break.
Wow. I needed a reminder why my policy of never using word unless absolutely unavoidable is a good one.
Becks, will you marry me?
Isn't that kind of pushing your love over the...
I cannot figure out any way to cut and paste news articles from websites and then remove extraneous lines between the headline and the body without this happening.
Paste them into Notepad first, which strips them of any formatting. Then C&P into Word. Done and done.
You can skip the Notepad text if in Word you select "Edit | Paste Special..." and paste the article as "Unformatted Text".
Er, ah, I mean "the Notepad step".
Well yeah, but I would like to not have a long Word file be an undifferentiated string of text. I guess I have to resign myself to making it all the same font, and then going back and making all the headlines or chapter headings bold so that it's readable.
This is just symptomatic, though, of Word's constant font shenanigans. If I input something in Verdana 7.5, and instantly change it to Times New Roman 10, and then input several more things in Verdana 7.5, and instantly change them all to Times New Roman 10, this should not suggest to Word that the default font from now on will be Verdana 7.5. Whenever I post a picture or graph at the end of a file, and then start typing after the picture, it invariably makes the new text go back to some weird font that I hoped had been eradicated by my multiple "SELECT ALL --> FONT SIZE: 10" changes.
It would be nice if "SELECT ALL" applied to the entire document, instead of leaving some space at the end where the font of your choice has not been made dominant.
wait, weren't we just complaining about lame-ass blegs?
62: That's why this is so damn funny. But it was funny on purpose, right?
In either case, Drezner needs to show up here and beat someone (virtually) with a stapler. Unless he's too busy enjoying tenure.
Maybe you were, mike d, but the rest of us were taking an opportunity to slam another dupe of the neocons in the language of bleg-disdaining.
I hate having to spell everything out.
Back when it was my job to do this sort of stuff, I learned that you can't even hope to predict the range of problems C&Ping will introduce to a Word document. And Paste Special Unformatted Text is the pull-out method of protected-text strategies.
65 -- what does "the pull-out method of protected-text strategies" mean?
Oh -- after a little reflection I understand.
Paste Special Unformatted Text is the pull-out method of protected-text strategies.
I now feel dirty.
6 made me laugh out loud.
This--To get rid of the line, put the cursor directly above it and select Borders and Shading from the Format menu. Click the None box and click OK. To prevent the automatic insertion of borders, select AutoCorrect Options from the Tools menu, click the AutoFormat As You Type tab, and uncheck Border lines. In Word 97, the menu item is AutoCorrect and the check box is labeled simply Borders--too. Of course, how simple!
I hate word and don't use it any more. I use Mac's Text Edit, or Pages. Or this handy thing called WriteRoom, which is free, and does nothing but enter plain, unformatted text. Ah, the good old days.
54: If you're using Firefox (and if you aren't, why not?), there's an extension called "Copy Plain Text" that adds an item to the Edit menu and the contextual menus that lets you copy text without formatting. You can find it at addons.mozilla.org.
I consider it indispensable.
(Wow, thanks to Firefox 2.0's built-in spell checker, I didn't misspell "indispensable"! Thanks, Firefox developers!)
I love that you nerds burned through 50 + comments in less than an hour to solve this one.
I lament that I read the post and thought, "Oh, I know how to fix that!" You would not believe the formatting garbage I used to get in Word from authors back when I edited medical textbooks. I had some serious macro libraries for cleaning up manuscripts.
I had the EXACT SAME PROBLEM as Labs, except using hyphens instead of dashes. I had let it be because the document was just a big datadump. As I continued entering data, the border appeared at the end of every damn page. Oddly, when I did "select all" and then the "Borders and Shading" window as stated above, it deleted the plain old section breaks I had previously used before it went loco.
I guess what I had thought were breaks had been insiduously transformed into borders without my knowledge.
My suggestion for Labs is that in the future he use OpenOffice.
Or emacs+latex.
Of course, Ben is correct here.
My further suggestion for Labs is regards his intended symbol for setting aside a block of text. I suspect that "***" is likely to be less confusing to his readers than "***," would be.
Evidently vi users don't know how to make topical jokes.
Emacs caused Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's.
In my copy of Word, I recorded a macro to paste special (unformatted text), then remapped the keyboard so that "ctrl-V" corresponded to that -- leaving shift-insert in case I want a more traditional paste. That completely eliminates the need to copy it into Notepad first. This saved me near-infinite frustration during one of my freelancing phases when I had to copy and paste a lot of stuff off the Internet.
My general advice is to turn everything off in Word -- the only thing I have left on is curly quotes and em dashes. It's almost infinitely customizable, so once you get it set up it can be wonderful, but the default settings are uniformly disastrous.
There are, though, people whimpering about exactly this problem in Openoffice. But it is in general saner at formatting than Word.
Copy it into WordPerfect, turn on reveal codes and fix it in a couple of seconds. As a matter of fact, always work in WP and then save as Word.
I think 57 deserves some appreciation. Bravo!