Word 2003: Same As Previous in Footer

I have a doc that has 31 pages. I changed the portrait to landscape and the header and footers were fine. I then changed it back to portrait and I can't get footer to format without formatting the previous landscape pages footer. The headers are still independent. It says 'Same As Previous' above the faulty footer but I can't get rid of it. Any suggestions?

 

This looks like the kind of formatting problem that you see in other versions of Word and they can be difficult to fix. Once a Word document gets its formatting knickers in a twist it can be hard to unravel.

Two suggestions.

1. If the document is fairly straight forward (text with relatively few style changes): cut and paste the text into notepad - that will effectively remove all the formatting data which appears to have become corrupted in this document. Then open a new Word document and copy the text from notepad into the new document and format it as you need it.

2. Try opening the document in an alternative Wordprocessor package and see if you can get it to behave there. My personal favourite is Open Office. I run it along side Office (2000) with no problems. Occasionally I've had a problem in Word. Open the document in Open Office Writer, use that to change the parameter I'm having problems with and save it in *.doc format. I then go back to Word and everything is fine.

Of course the best approach is to make regular backups. Then when this kind of thing happens you can just revert to as previous version. However, most people (I include myself) don't keep good enough backup/version control with Word Docs.