What I get is change style, and when I select the style it asks me if I want to delete the footer. In Word and in Open Office there is an option to edit the footer. I cannot find that option in LibreOffice. Any suggestions for what used to be a very simple process would be appreciated.
I think you may be trying to edit the footer by repeating the command to insert a footer (Insert/Footer). If a footer exists the Default Style pop-out from the Insert/Footer menu has a check box and clicking on the Default Style does offer to delete the footer.
If you want to edit the footer contents, just move to the footer and edit it. No menu command needed.
If you want to change the style of the footer, you can do that directly or you can edit the footer style in the Styles and Formatting dialog (F11).
I could not just click on the words in the footer to have it edit… It turned out that my footer was empty and there was a floating text box. I saved a copy of my work just in case, deleted the footer from the menu, and what I thought was the footer was still there. I clicked on it and I was finally able to edit it. It was a textbox. I was able to delete it and re-add a footer.
This document that I am talking about was created a long, long time ago, possibly even in star office, but probably OpenOffice before LibreOffice existed.