Deleting Tables And Rows In Consent Documents

Without Messing Up HeadersWord 2007

Below is a split screen view of the last page of the consent document and the top of the first page of the HIPAA Authorization in the IRB Consent Document Template.

Often when people trying to delete the last section inadvertently often highlight too far (light blue arrow to light blue arrow) including the non-visible continuous section-break (dark blue arrow) resulting in the Authorization heading being extended into the consent document.

First click the “draft” view in the lower right hand corner of the MS Word window.

Now you can see the previously invisible continuous section-break used to distinguish when the document should start using the different section header. The dotted line is the natural page break that occurs because the data on the page has reached the length (height) previously specified in the layout as the maximum page length. After that you see the manual page break inserted as part of the template to ensure the Authorization always starts on a full page.

To delete the surrogate signature section, indicated below by the blue arrow, follow these steps.

Click somewhere in the signature section but not above the first signature line. Preferably in the text. In the example below you could click in the child text or the date text as noted.

In doing so you clicked into a table allowing the Table Tools menu to now show on the ribbon at the top of the Word window. Click “Layout”.

Click “View Gridlines”

Now the blue dotted lines are visible indicating the structure of the table.

You may want to just delete one row of signatures or an entire signature set (one table). Starting with the deletion of one row you can click in the title of the signature row you want to delete, you may even highlight the cell or more than one cell on that row so you can clearly see which row will be deleted.

Right click in the cell (or highlighted cell) (the green arrow). Click Delete cells.

In the pop up box change the radio button option to Delete entire row. Click ok.

Alternately you can click the little down-arrow under the delete button in the ribbon at the top of the Word Window then select Delete Rows

To delete the entire table, return to print layout at the bottom right of the Word Window as pictured here.

Again be sure your cursor is in one of the cells. This will allow the plus sign in a box to show up in the upper left corner of the table (the Blue triangle below point to it.) Move your cursor carefully over the plus sign and right click and hit cut.

If this is difficult (mouse sensitivity of some computers makes it difficult to hold position and right click, you can use the ribbon at the top here as well. But instead of clicking delete row as pictured below you would click delete table.

Lastly, you could left click the plus sign which highlights the entire table, then right click anywhere in the table (green arrow) and click Cut.

Confirm you have correctly deleted the table without deleting the continuous section break click the Draft button again at the bottom right of the Word window. Entering this view is important to the next step of the deltion process.

Highlight the text that remains that is associated with the table you removed. Be careful not to include the Section Break in the highlighted area. Then right click the highlighted area and hit cut.

Below is an example of how not to highlight the remaining text. In the bad example below, the user clicked and dragged from the beginning of the paragraph they wanted to delete but kept going.

This will result in highlighting more than you wanted. If you were to change the view back to draft you would see the breaks are also highlighted and would then also be deleted when you deleted the text.