Headers Are Screwed Up on Word - Defies Resolution

[Angkor]

Amazon recently unpublished one of my books because of formatting issues and invited me to republish after fixing them. Every ten pages, or so, the distance between text and header and footer is out of whack; specifically, a few lines of text occupy the center of the page. On the affected pages, the bad header appears about a third of the way down the page. This document is in Word '97; converting it to the latest edition of Word doesn't fix it. Neither do stripping the format or selecting any of the other formats. Manual tinkering likewise doesn't fix it.

I want to get this book back up as an ebook earning me money, but this header/footer issue defies resolution. I would welcome any suggestions to help me troubleshoot.

[Bigglesworth]

What do you mean exactly by 'stripping the format'? Perhaps the following but I'll say it anyway:

(Of course, do nothing without making a copy of your document first)

Try selecting the entire document and selecting 'normal' formatting. Delete the headers and footers. If everything looks okay, start rebuilding the formatting.

No joy? Will Word save in Open Document Format? If so, save as an odt file and try working on the problem in OpenOffice/LibreOffice.

Still no luck? Try taking the entire text out of Word and into a plain text editor. Does Notepad still have a document size limit? I'm not sure. Anyway, select all in Word and copy/paste into the plain text editor. Save as plain text. Load this up as a new document in Word and set it up afresh. Alternatively, start a new document in Word and copy/paste the text from the plain text editor into the new doc.

Good luck!

[Matera the Mad]

Section breaks?

[DanielAnuchan]

I propose the option of copying it into a plain text editor, such as Notepad, then creating a new document in Word. But be warned, this strips out all formatting, such as italics. But sometimes it's the only way to get it back.

[bonitakale]

Haven't used Open Office in a while, but it used to be able to open Word docs; maybe the issue could be fixed there.

But I think the plain text people have it right; that's the surest way to get rid of whatever sneaky codes Word is sticking in there.

[Matera the Mad]

I would do that ^. Word can bollix things up better than any other known app, and sometimes you just have to fight dirty.

[Angkor]

The plain text option did the trick. After making my fixes there, I converted back to Word and it all came out all right. Thanks all for your constructive tips.