Clicking "remove header" doesn't remove the header.

Question

With my cursor in the header of a page I click "remove header" and nothing happens.  How can I remove the header (and footer).  Further, is there a way to remove all headers and footers at once?

tia

las

Answer 1

The icon for the Remove Header command always has a red X, because it's just part of the icon:

It doesn't mean the command is disabled.

When a header contains any text or image or anything else, then the Remove Header command removes that content and leaves an empty paragraph mark. (That's exactly what Stefan's macro does, too.) It emphatically does not "remove the header" to leave nothing there. If there is no content in the header (except for the empty paragraph mark), then the Remove Header command doesn't make any change.

If you really want to get rid of the header, click the little button in the Layout > Page Setup group to open the Page Setup dialog. Go to the Layout tab of the dialog and set the Header measurement to zero.

You can restrict that to the current section or let it affect the entire document.

P.S.: In Word, "page breaks" and "section breaks" are entirely different things. To remove sections, you must have deleted section breaks. The headers, footers, and settings of margins, orientation, page size, and columns are stored in the section break at the end of the section. https://wordmvp.com/FAQs/Formatting/WorkWithSections.htm

Answer 2

Hi I'm Peter an independent advisor, there's a similar article on our community website which may be of help to you as the remove header option isn't working for you:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/fo...

Answer 3

The article says you have to remove content before removing a header.  I don't have any content.  Further, sometimes "previous" works to get me to a different header, but often it doesn't.  Is my document hopelessly corrupt?

tia

las

Answer 4

Double-click the header area to activate the header/footer view. Select and delete header content.

If you have enabled "Different first page" and "Different odd and even" on the Header & Footer Tools tab, each section has three headers (and three footers), each of which must be deleted separately.

You can use a macro to delete all headers in a document in one step. Here is a simple version:

Sub DeleteAllHeadersInDoc()

'Macro created by Stefan Blom, MVP, September 2019

Dim s As Section

For Each s In ActiveDocument.Sections

s.Headers(wdHeaderFooterEvenPages).Range.Text = ""

s.Headers(wdHeaderFooterFirstPage).Range.Text = ""

s.Headers(wdHeaderFooterPrimary).Range.Text = ""

Next s

End Sub

For assistance, see https://www.gmayor.com/installing_macro.htm.

Note that there is another thread with similar content (started by LaurelS): https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/what-are-sections-in-headers-how-can-i-get-rid-of/7aeab0d3-fe2a-4e0d-8149-cd6f7e29c09c.

Answer 5

There's useful info here, and I'm glad to see the macro, but it didn't solve the problem of the Delete header having an X on it.  None of my headers had text in them.  But the problem is gone as I got rid of Sections by deleting page breaks.  Go figure.