How to Delete a Section Break in Microsoft Word 2016

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Microsoft Word has a number of different formatting options that can affect the layout of the document.

Some of these options, such as a page break, can be difficult to find or see because there isn’t a visual indicator of the section break in the document.

Luckily you can enable something in Microsoft Word that lets you see all of these formatting marks, allowing you to delete them.

Our guide below is going to show you how to delete a section break from a Word document.

How to Remove a Section Break in Microsoft Word

The steps in this article were performed in Microsoft Word for Office 365, but will work in most other recent versions of Microsoft Word as well.

Step 1: Open the document.

Step 2: Select the Home tab at the top of the window.

select the Home tab

Step 3: Click the Show/Hide button in the Paragraph section of the ribbon.

click the Show/Hide button

Step 4: Use your mouse to select the section break.

how to delete a section break in Microsoft Word

Step 5: Press the Backspace or Delete key on your keyboard.

Tip: Selecting the break can be a little tricky. You may need to click at the beginning of the line below the break, then drag your mouse up to select it.

The section break should now be removed from the document. You can repeat this process for any additional section breaks that you wish to remove from the document.

Additional section breaks can be added in Word by clicking the Layout tab, clicking Breaks, then choosing the desired type of break. There are page breaks on this menu, too, if you wish to use one of those.

You can then click the Show/Hide button again to stop displaying the rest off the formatting and layout characters.

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