Section breaks have broken me.

October 7, 2024 2:28 PM

I'm required to do a lot of copy/paste on Word docs from 2006 to get around the question of unremovable section breaks. This isn't working either. Is there anything to be done?

I'm supposed to be updating very old Word docs. I am required to keep and work with these docs, I cannot just copy/paste all the info into a fresh new doc, it's not allowed. All changes must be tracked. They all have a ton of section breaks embedded into them that leave a lot of extra space that we can't get to delete (like empty pages). I was told that trying to delete a section break in mid-document just starts to scramble the information, so I must copy and paste all of the information above the first section break and then theoretically the empty section breaks will pile up at the bottom of the old doc when I'm done and THEN I can delete them.

Except this doesn't work either since copying, pasting, and moving old formatted tables and weird graphics that have column breaks and all this shit just get scrambled and messy too. Even worse than they were before. I was told to use Split Screen, but I'm hating it because I'm not even sure what I'm doing, pasting, seeing, and especially messing up with the divided view. I have 95 pages of this to have to do on one doc alone and a lot more to go after that.

Is there anything to be done to make this less excruciating?

posted by jenfullmoon to Computers & Internet (16 answers total)

Who told you that you can’t just delete them? That doesn’t make sense to me. It shouldn’t screw anything up - I’m wondering if the person who said that was just doing it wrong. Start with turning on visible formatting marks and see if selecting and deleting works?
posted by showbiz_liz at 2:35 PM on October 7 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Your old Word docs likely have the pre-2016 formatting bug that will make reformatting impossible. Sadly, if the track changes history is as important as they tell you, this problem will never go away.
posted by scruss at 2:43 PM on October 7 [2 favorites]

Why do you want to remove the section breaks? They are generally added for a reason and removing them will change the headers/footers and page numbers.
posted by Lanark at 2:46 PM on October 7 [1 favorite]

I would lean towards trying delete all formatting and then slowly rebuilding them. It will be a mess, but I think it will be less of a mess than copying & pasting will leave you with.

The other thing I would do is take one of the documents, copy everything including the formatting into a new document, then experiment on it. That way you don't have to worry about deleting something vital while you figure out the least painful way to do this.
posted by mygothlaundry at 2:50 PM on October 7 [3 favorites]

Consider using a tool like Pandoc for mass conversion into a sensible text format like LaTeX or Markdown or even just PDF.

I don't understand your being forced to keep tracking and updating a 20+ year dated and broken format like Word. Any reason for that?
posted by Down10 at 3:05 PM on October 7

Response by poster: Start with turning on visible formatting marks and see if selecting and deleting works?

I have them on. Some things will copy/paste/delete and others will not. I have seen extremely weird things happen in just the last few hours trying to move all of this crap. Like "I didn't know graphics could DO that" and some formatting will not change.

I was told I had to use the old procedures and it's Very Important to track every single change and have evidence of those changes. (I suspect this translates into "we have receipts to show management.") I tried copying and pasting and rewriting my own document instead early on in this project, and was told I couldn't do that.

Why do you want to remove the section breaks? They are generally added for a reason and removing them will change the headers/footers and page numbers.

Because there's like empty pages (2-3 at a time) in a 95 page document that nobody wants or needs.

Never mind. Thanks anyway.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:27 PM on October 7

I don't completely understand what you're trying to do, but you may be able to work with the section breaks using find and replace.

You might also consider turning on view formatting marks to better understand what the issue that's causing blank pages is now. If the goal is just to fix the blank pages issue, you can probably find out if there are stray page breaks or something that are making it worse.

If you're doing copy paste and want to keep formatting, make sure to right click and select the source format paste options. But if I were trying to do what you're trying to do, I would probably find another way.
posted by lookoutbelow at 3:27 PM on October 7

Because there's like empty pages (2-3 at a time) in a 95 page document that nobody wants or needs.

Then swap them for continuous breaks instead.
posted by Lanark at 3:35 PM on October 7 [2 favorites]

So you aren't trying to preserve previous changes, just tracking your changes? If so, and if copying and pasting into a new document would work if not for the requirement of tracking your changes, have you tried creating a new document and comparing it to the old document? That will give you the equivalent of tracked changes in the new document. If they're paying you to do something and they want you to do it in a way that is inefficient that's on them, but I've seen compare documents give me the equivalent of tracked changes if that will work for them and if it actually fixes your issue.
posted by willnot at 3:44 PM on October 7 [2 favorites]

I have sometimes been able to start fixing this type thing at the end of the doc and work forward. I have no idea if this bizzare method will work but it's another thing to try with an old beastly word doc.
posted by mightshould at 3:46 PM on October 7 [1 favorite]

You can generate tracked changes by comparing two Word docs. Would it be possible to build your new clean doc from scratch and then do a comparison to the old messy one to generate the required tracked changes?
posted by music for skeletons at 3:50 PM on October 7 [2 favorites]

I was going to say. The common way to capture wholesale changes between two different versions of a document is to do a blackline (Review > Compare). That will generate a "version" of the document which reflects all changes between versions.
posted by praemunire at 4:03 PM on October 7 [4 favorites]

Where I work, "document reissued in its entirety" IS a change that can go in the change log. The old ones are still retained but a new version is started and filed in the same place.

That doesn't help you re-use text, charts, tables from the old ones, though. Can you change the type of section break to one that doesn't insert any visible space, like Lanark suggested?
posted by ctmf at 4:13 PM on October 7 [2 favorites]

I've read that if you highlight an entire document except for the last paragraph formatting mark, Word often lets you do things you otherwise can't. I don't know if or how that would work in your case, but it wouldn't hurt to try.
posted by sardonyx at 7:03 PM on October 7

I don't know if this would be useful, but what if you tried to edit these ancient documents in the ancient version of the software.

If you can run an older version of Windows in VirtualBox with an old version of office... Maybe then you can remove the section breaks without breaking everything...

I haven't tried to do such a thing, but I feel like it would be worth a shot, because the current process sounds untenable.
posted by skunk pig at 8:44 PM on October 7

Try viewing in Draft mode. This will let you see and delete the section breaks. This might still entirely fuck up the formatting in some bizarre way, because that's how Word rolls, but you can in fact delete the section breaks.
posted by yasaman at 9:15 PM on October 7