How to delete unwanted blank pages from your documents

Turn on paragraph marks to see what’s causing the blank page:

Press CTRL+SHIFT+8 or click the Show/Hide ¶ button on the Home tab of the Ribbon.

Once you have the paragraph marks turned on, you can see what’s causing the blank pages in the document.

Extra paragraphs

If you have extra, blank, paragraphs at the end of your document you’ll see empty paragraph marks (¶) on the blank page. Select and then delete them by pressing the Delete key on your keyboard.

Manual page break

If the empty page is the result of a manual page break, you can place your cursor directly before the page break and press Delete to delete it.

This is one of the most common causes of an unwanted blank page in the middle of a document too.

Section break

Next Page, Odd Page, and Even Page section breaks may create a new page in Word. If your empty page occurs at the end of your document and you have a section break there, you can place your cursor directly before the section break and press Delete to delete it. That should remove the blank page.

NOTE: If you are having trouble seeing your section breaks try going to the View tab of the Ribbon and switch to Draft mode.

CAUTION: If a section break is causing a blank page in the middle of a document, removing the section break can cause formatting issues. If you intended for the content that follows that point to have different formatting, then keep the section break. You don’t want to delete the section break because that would cause the pages before the section break to take on the formatting of the pages after the section break. You can, however, change the section break to a Continuous section break, which will preserve the formatting changes without inserting a blank page.

To change the section break to a Continuous section break:

1. Place your cursor after the section break you want to change.

2. Go to the Layout tab of the Ribbon.

3. Click the Page Setup dialog launcher.

1. On the Layout tab of the Page Setup dialog box, click the Section start drop down and select Continuous.

1. Click OK.

That should remove your blank page without affecting your formatting.

Table at the end of the document

If you still have an unwanted blank page at the end of your document, then it’s likely that the preceding page has a table that goes all the way to the bottom of it. Word requires an empty paragraph after the table and if your table goes all the way to the bottom of the page the empty paragraph will be pushed onto the next page. You won’t be able to delete that empty paragraph mark.

NOTE: Many resume templates are formatted with full-page tables.

The easiest way to resolve this is to simply hide the empty paragraph at the end of the document.

1. Select the paragraph mark and press CTRL+D to open the Font dialog.

2. Click the Hidden checkbox to hide that paragraph.

3. Turn off Show/Hide ¶ by clicking the button on the Ribbon or pressing CTRL+SHIFT+8.

The extra page should delete now.