One way would be to highlight the entire document text, copy and paste it into a plain text editor, then copy and paste it back into a new Word document.
Rojash, what a fantastic gift to suffering humanity! 'Just Great Software' really seem to deserve the moniker they have adopted. Almost too good to be true! I work in a lot of languages (not Hindi or Sanskrit, if those are yours, but I did study them for a while), and I have already tried it out on a few. Just the job for things that Word is too cumbersome for. I might even be convinced that it merits an upgrade to Pro! Many thanks.
thanks for all your answers but it seems a bit too technical for me - however when you go onto job it wont let you highlight eg select all - it just selects one page which at 500 pages would be too much.
I downloaded Editlite - it just looked like a page to me and I say the said job only highlights one page at a time. Sorry for not understanding your technicalities. You obviously know what you are talking about.
Sounds like a job for the part of Word's VBA. It is a programming environment that facilitates automation of any action in the program or the whole Windows environment. It is the language used for macros and includes a syntax to refer to any part of an Office document.
Basically the script would loop through the collection of headers and footers in the document, select their text and write it to a new document. Essentially it rapidly repeats the actions you would do manually.
However, although this would be a simple task for an experienced VBA programmer there is a significant learning curve before a beginner would be able to write a script like this.