How to Remove Header and Heading styles in Word

In this article today, I want to show you how to remove Headers and heading styles in Microsoft Word.

I want to kill two birds with one stone since headers and heading styles are two different things altogether. So in the first part of this tutorial, I’ll explain how to remove or delete a header in Word before looking at heading styles.

How to remove Header in Word

A header is the top margin of a page in Microsoft Word. Headers are normally used for titles, page numbers, dates, logos and other essential bits of information.

There are two ways to remove or delete a header in Microsoft Word. Without further ado, let’s get started.

Option 1: Using the Remove header command

To delete or remove headers in Word:

Go to the Insert tab.

In the Header & Footer group, click on the Header button.

A drop-down box will appear, click on Remove Header at the bottom of the drop-down to remove the header from your Word document.

This is how you may exit headers in Microsoft Word.

Option 2: Clear all the header content to remove the header in Word

Another way to delete header in Word is to double-click on the header area to make it editable. Then select all the content in the header and hit the delete key. After deleting the header content, the header itself will disappear from all your pages.

How to remove heading styles in Word

Microsoft Word comes with a library of heading styles you can use in your document.

These styles are very handy as it allows you to apply changes to all your headings at once. It also allows you to do other fancy things like collapse and expand content under each heading.

Heading styles also helps if you want to insert an automatic table of Content into your document.

Despite all these awesome things heading styles can do, you may want to remove it in your Word document for some reason.

Without further ado, below are the various ways you can remove headings in Word.

First Option: Apply Normal Paragraph style

All the heading styles, Heading 1 through Heading 9, have their own formatting, which you can modify anyway.

There’s also a style called Normal style. It is designed to have the same formatting as the body text. And applying this style means you are switching from one of the headings to a body text, removing all the heading properties from the text.

The steps are bulleted below:

Highlight the heading or headings you want to remove the styles from. If you want to remove heading styles from the entire document, use Ctrl+A to select all content in the document. Just know that selecting all will clear every other formatting like Bold, Italic, bullets (●), and so on.

Highligt the heading text from which you want to remove the styles

Go to the Home tab, in the Styles group, and select Normal.

Clicking the Normal style option will remove the heading properties from the text.

Option two: Remove Heading Styles Using the styles dialog

There’s a dialog box that contains most of the styles. Through this dialog of styles, you can change any heading into a body text or normal text by clearing all the styles or formatting applied to the text.

Just follow the steps below to see what I am talking about:

Highlight the heading or headings you wish to change into a normal text.

Press Alt+Ctrl+Shift+S to display the Styles dialog box

Press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+S to display the Styles dialog

Click on Clear All to remove the heading style properties from the text.

All the formats that were making the heading to look different from the body text will disappear. The body text and the headings will have the same appearance now.

Option 3: Using the “Clear All Formatting” Command

There’s yet, another command that performs the same task as in the previous methods.

This is a command that clears all formatting that has been applied to text in Word.

To use this command, the steps are outlined below:

Highlight the Heading you want to change

Go to the Home tab, in the Font group, click on the “Clear all formatting” icon.

See screenshot:

In the Home tab, Click on "Clear All Formatting"

Now Word will remove all the Heading style properties (AKA formatting) from the selection, leaving only the normal, unformatted text.

Bonus Tip: Another place to get access to the Clear Formatting command is in the Styles library section. Go to the Home tab, in the Styles group, click the small triangular icon at the right side to expand for more styles.

See screenshot: