Word 2003 question

[mmegaera]

I am having a serious issue with Word 2003, which a) they will pry from my cold, dead fingers, and b) I can't afford to replace (no, I can't go Open Office or any other word processor with Smashwords -- it gets butt ugly -- besides, they insist on a .doc not a .docx, anyway).

This document does not have a header or a footer, nor do I want it to have one. But Smashwords keeps insisting that I have a tab in this document (no, I don't, I use Styles consistently the way Smashwords insists upon), and when I use ^t in Find to find these non-existent tabs, one keeps showing up in the otherwise empty (that I never put anything into to begin with) header.

And IT WON'T LET ME DELETE THAT TAB. So I can't get my books back into Smashwords. I've contacted Smashwords, and I've tried and tried to get rid of it myself. But even cutting and pasting it into Notepad and back -- and manually reformatting the entire 200+ page manuscript, including hundreds of word-by-word italicizations and other stuff like that -- DOES NOT WORK. The ^T^$&&*(&*( tab just automagically reappears when I paste the text into a new Word document.

Help? Please? Someone? Please don't let me come back to this and find no comments, and please don't let me come back to find just sympathy comments and no help. PLEASE. I don't have anyone else to ask.

All I was trying to do was update the back matter in my books... That's all, really. And I can't even go back to the old versions now. Smashwords won't let me.

ETA: I fixed it, if fix is the right word. What I did was copy the text over piece by piece, checking for an inserted tab after each paste. Somehow I managed to copy the text over into a new document without copying the tab -- somehow. I just wish I knew how it got in there in the first place [sigh].

Comments

[sraun]

FWIW, I recall there being a 'delete header & footer' command somewhere in Word 2003. That might have helped?

[mmegaera]

If there is, I can't find it anywhere. That's what I was hoping someone would tell me specifically how to find [wry g].

[sraun]

Here's what I found - I don't have a copy 2003 handy to check.

http://www.ehow.com/how_6770913_delete-header-word-document.html

Control-A could be useful in trying to follow these instructions.

[mmegaera]

Yeah, that's basically the instructions I followed. Didn't work to get rid of the tab, alas.

I've managed to copy the document chunk by chunk (as opposed to "select all") into a new document without copying the tab. I don't call this fixed, because I never did find out how the tab got in there in the first place and therefore have no way of preventing this happening again in the future, but at least Smashwords finally decided to take the document.

[sraun]

Do you still have a copy of the original broken document? If so, mind if I look at it and poke for a while? I might come up with something that you could use next time. You could e-mail it to sraun@fireopal.org.

[mmegaera]

It's a 200+ page novel. Hmmm... Looks like deleting all but one page of the document leaves the tab in the header. So I'll send you that.

Thanks, Scott. It's on its way.

[nishatalitha]

Only thing I can think of (I will have a hunt around in Word later to see if I can find anything in MS Word that might help) is to copy a page or two either side of the affected section into Notepad, which will strip the formatting, and then put it back in word and redo the formatting. Very similar to what you did, but with the added bonus of knowing that you've taken it out... It's not the ideal solution and is the long way around, but the trick of copying some text into Notepad (particularly for short formatting errors) is one to remember.

I'm not sure how a tab would have got there in the first place.

[mmegaera]

How would I do that when the tab's in the header, though? And there's no text in the header? I never even opened the header when I was writing/formatting the document.