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How To Remove All Headers And Footers In Word?

Author: Sun Last Modified: 2024-09-05

Normally, you can quickly remove all the headers and footers from a Word document by simply double-clicking the header or footer field and deleting them. However, if your document contains multiple headers and footers, this process can become cumbersome and time-consuming.

To help you efficiently manage this task, we will explore several methods to remove headers and footers in various scenarios.

Remove the header and footer from the first page in active document

If you want to remove the header and footer from only the first page of the current document while keeping them on other pages, follow these steps:

  1. Open the Word document, navigate to the first page, and double-click the header area to enter editing mode.
  2. Under the Header & Footer tab, check Different First Page. See screenshot:

    Different First Page option on the ribbon

  3. Click Close Header and Footer to exit editing mode, and the header on the first page will be removed. See screenshot:
    Document with header
    Arrow
    Document with header removed

Tips: To remove the footer from the first page, please repeat the above steps.

Remove all headers and footers in active document

If the whole document contains only one type header and footer, to remove all of them, the below steps can help you to solve it quickly and easily.

1. Double-click the header in any one page to go to the editing mode, and then, select the content of the header, see screenshot:

The header is selected

2. Then, press Delete key on keyboard, and then click Close Header and Footer to exit the editing mode, all headers in this current document have been deleted immediately.

Close Header and Footer button on the ribbon

Tips: To remove all footers from this document, please repeat the above steps.

Remove all various headers and footers in active document with VBA code

Supposing, your document has been divided into multiple sections, and every section has each header or footer. So, there are multiple various headers or footers in active document, to remove all these various headers or footers, you need to apply the above method for deleting the headers or footers over and over again. Here, I will introduce a VBA code for dealing with this task.

1. Open the Word file that you want to remove all the headers and footers, and then hold down the ALT + F11 keys to open the Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications window.

2. Click Insert > Module, and paste the following macro in the Module Window.

VBA code: Remove all various headers and footers in current document:

Sub RemoveHeadAndFoot()
'Update by Extendoffice
    Dim oSec As Section
    Dim oHead As HeaderFooter
    Dim oFoot As HeaderFooter
    For Each oSec In ActiveDocument.Sections
        For Each oHead In oSec.Headers
            If oHead.Exists Then oHead.Range.Delete
        Next oHead
        For Each oFoot In oSec.Footers
            If oFoot.Exists Then oFoot.Range.Delete
        Next oFoot
    Next oSec
     Selection.WholeStory
    ActiveWindow.ActivePane.View.SeekView = wdSeekCurrentPageHeader
    Selection.ParagraphFormat.Borders(wdBorderBottom).LineStyle = wdLineStyleNone
    ActiveWindow.ActivePane.View.SeekView = wdSeekMainDocument
End Sub

3. Then press F5 key to run this code, all various headers and footers are deleted at once.

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Remove all various headers, footers and watermarks in active document with Inspect Document feature

If you are not familiar with the VBA code, you can also use the Inspect Document feature of Word to remove all headers and footers with ease. Please do with the following steps:

1. Click File > Info > Check for Issues > Inspect Document, see screenshot:

File > Info > Check for Issues > Inspect Document

2. In the popped-out Document Inspector dialog box, only check the Header, Footers, and Watermarks option in the dialog box, make sure other options unchecked. See screenshot:

Header, Footers, and Watermarks option in the Document Inspector dialog

3. Then, click Inspect button, after inspecting the document, click Remove All button in the dialog box, see screenshot:

Remove All button in the Document Inspector dialog

4. And then, click the Close button, all headers, footers as well as the watermarks have been removed from the whole document.

Note: If there are watermarks in the document, they will be removed as well.

Remove all header lines in active document with an amazing feature

Sometimes, you just want to remove the horizontal line under the header content, in this case, I will introduce a use tool-Kutools for Word, with its Clear Header Lines feature, you can remove all horizontal header lines from the header with only one click.

For using this feature, please download and install Kutools for Word firstly!

After downloading and installing Kutools for Word, please do as this:

1. Click Kutools > Remove > Clear header Lines, see screenshot:

Clear header Lines button on the ribbon

2. And then, a prompt box is popped out, please click Yes button, see screenshot:

Document with horizontal header lines under the header

3. And all the horizontal header lines under the header have been removed at once.

Arrow
Arrow
Document with horizontal header lines under the header removed

More relative headers and footers articles:

  • Add Chapter Title To Header Or Footer In Word Document
  • Normally, you can insert the header or footer with document path, name quickly and easily in a Word file. But, have you ever tried to insert the chapter title to header or footer, so that, the content of the header or footer is depended on what chapter the page is in. This article, I will talk about how to solve this job in Word document.
  • Print Word Document Without Header And Footer
  • If there are header and footer in your Word document, when printing this document, the header and footer will be printed as well by default. But, sometimes, you needn’t the header and footer to be printed. In this case, the method in this article may help you.
  • Copy Page With Header And Footer In Word
  • In general, you can copy a page from one Word document to another easily. However, the page header and footer won’t be copied with page content simultaneously. Comparing to copying the page header and footer manually, this article will introduce a tricky way to copy page with header and footer in Word.

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