How To Remove Page Breaks Correctly In Word

Page breaks are such a great feature in word. They split your documents and make things all neat and tidy. I like that!  But, and it’s a big but (no pun intended) if they show up in the wrong place in your document, and they have to be removed. We all know that you do not want to leave a paragraph with core information moved to a new page– you want the reader to have a smooth experience. As we all know, Word is very helpful in automatically inserting page breaks. Having said that, they do not always appear where we would like them. The good news is that we can insert our page breaks, but there are occasions when we need to go back and remove some of them.

I get tons of e-mail from subscribers lamenting that they deleted a page break and it skewed all their formatting.

Follow the steps below to learn how to properly remove page breaks:

1. If you are using Word 365, your page breaks may be visible to you in editing mode. If not, click on Show/Hide in the Paragraph group on your Ribbon. As you know, I am a huge fan of always having Show/Hide enabled.

2. To remove your page breaks, double-click to select the page break and tap your Delete key to remove it.
3. Now, here’s the rub.  We are not able to delete automatic page breaks in Word. However, we can adjust our settings in Word to make them work for us.
4. Highlight the paragraphs that contain the breaks you would like to adjust.
5. Click the Layout tab on your Ribbon.

6. Click the arrow in the lower left-hand side of the Paragraph area.
7. Click the Line and Page Breaks tab.
8. You will note that there are four options available to you that can affect how your page is laid out:

• • Window/Orphan: Ensures that you will always have at least two lines at the top and bottom of every page in your document
  • Keep with next: Will allow you to link two paragraphs together such that there will not be any page breaks between them
  • Keep lines together: Will keep your complete paragraph together (i.e., a page break will be either before or after your paragraph
  • Page break before: Will force the automatic page break to be before your paragraph and shifting it to the next page

9. Do not worry if none of these options work for you. Simply do not use them and in that instance, the automatic page breaks will appear as they normally do.
10. Once you have selected your options, click OK. The settings will then be applied to your entire document.

I hope this has been helpful to you!

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