Hi, this is Deborah from LegalOfficeGuru.com, and if you've ever had a watermark you couldn't get rid of,
then you'll want to stay tuned for the next 3:46, because I'm going to show you not only what this is and how to get rid of it,
but why it's there in the first place.
[intro music]
If you've ever opened a document to edit and decided you didn't need that watermark anymore, you probably did a pretty logical thing.
You went over to the Design tab in Word 2016 (or the Page Layout tab in earlier versions),
clicked on the Watermark button and chose Remove Watermark.
Except, nothing happened.
So you did it again
and again
and then you start saying very bad words to the computer.
I'd be willing to bet money that you were working with a document that either been converted directly from WordPerfect
or had text in it that had been copied from a WordPerfect document.
What you experienced is what I call "The WordPerfect Watermark That Won't Die".
You see, WordPerfect and Word treat watermarks very differently.
So when you move formatted text from one program to the other,
you can get some pretty infuriating results.
What you have on your hands is not actually a watermark,
but rather a text box embedded in the header.
That's why it's not responding to your efforts to remove a watermark.
Fortunately, it is possible to get rid of it.
Before we move directly to ridding ourselves of this text box,
I want to alert you to another common WordPerfect-to-Word snafu which can cause you to repeat this operation multiple times.
WordPerfect documents that have multiple headers and footers in them tend to come into Word with section breaks embedded,
and lots of them.
Our first task is to identify any unnecessary section breaks and remove them.
If you right click down here, and pimp out your Status Bar like I recommend,
you'll be able to see, as you scroll through the document, the section number change as you're scrolling.
That's your first clue that you got a bunch of section breaks hiding everywhere.
To get rid of all of them at once, click CTRL-H
to bring up the Find and Replace dialog box.
Click the More button and make sure your cursor is in the Find What field.
Then click the Special button and choose the Section Break, not the section character.
If you want to go through them one by one to make sure none of them are necessary,
you can click Find Next.
Otherwise click Replace All.
Then click the Close button.
Now, on to the main event.
Double-click into the header portion of the document.
Depending on how the text box is anchored you may or may not be able to grab it directly with the mouse.
One trick that always works: use CTRL-A to select everything in the header.
Then hit the Delete key.
Then Close Header and Footer.
Voila! No more persistent watermark.
If you find at this point that you deleted something accidentally,
use CTRL- Z or the Undo button
to undo this operation and go back and try again.
So that's how to delete an old WordPerfect watermark from your Word document.
This has been Deborah with LegalOfficeGuru.com. Thanks for watching!