How to Remove a Section Break in Microsoft Word

• Section breaks in Word allow you to break your document into separate sections.
• You can remove a section break in Word by showing the page break icons, and then deleting them.
• You can also remove several or all at once using the Find and Replace dialogue box.
• Visit Insider’s Tech Reference library for more stories.

In Microsoft Word, you can insert section breaks to divide your document into sections and apply formatting to specific blocks of text.

For example, you can have a section with different margin sizes, sections with different headers and footers, and more.

When you delete a section break, the text before and after the break combines into one section, which takes on the formatting of the latter section.

Here’s how to remove section breaks from your Word document.

How to remove a section break in Word

Whether you’re using Microsoft Word on Windows or Mac, the steps for removing section breaks are the same.

1. Select the Home tab if it isn’t already selected for the document.

2. Select Show/Hide ¶ to show the section breaks in your document.

3. Click the area just before the section break you want to remove, then hit the Delete key.

Make sure Track Changes is disabled or you won’t be able to remove section breaks. Select the Review tab and click Track Changes to expand the dropdown. Then, click Track Changes in the dropdown to disable the feature.

How to remove several or all section breaks at once

If you have multiple sections breaks in a Microsoft Word document, it can be tedious to remove them one by one. Luckily, there’s a way to remove several or all of them at once.

1. Select the Home tab if it isn’t already selected in your document.

2. Click Replace to bring up the Find and Replace dialogue box.

3. Click More >> on the bottom left.

4. At the bottom of the dialogue box, click Special to expand the dropdown and select Section Break. You will see that ^b will appear in the Find what text box.

5. Click Find Next until you find the section break you want to remove and then click Replace. Do this until you’ve removed the ones you want. Alternatively, you can remove all section breaks at once by clicking Replace All.