Dear Ms. Bytes

When I print my document, it always prints a blank page at the end. How can I remove blank pages in MSWord?

Sincerely – Arthur M.

Dear Arthur M.,

Dear Arthur,

This should be an easy fix. The blank page(s) printing at the end of your document simply means that you have several hard returns, or empty paragraphs, at the end of your document. To remove blank pages in MSWord, you will need to find and delete the extraneous hard returns at the bottom of the document.

You may not see the hard returns unless you turn on the Show/Hide feature which will display the non-printing characters in your document.

Turn on the Show/Hide feature

Find the Show/Hide button on the Home ribbon and click it to turn on and to turn off the non-printing characters in your document.

remove blank page in msword

 

The non-printing characters will appear in the document – these marks are very helpful when editing a document and will display characters such when you press the TAB key, or when you press the SPACEBAR, or when you press ENTER, and others. You will need to see these non-printing characters to remove blank pages in MSWord.

remove blank pages in msword

Find Empty Paragraphs

One easy way to get to the end of the document is to press CTRL+End. Now that you can see the non-printing characters, you will probably see several empty paragraphs, or hard returns. You can delete them by pressing the BACKSPACE key until you have removed them or you can select them all at once and press DELETE.

remove blank pages in msword

Blank Page Following a Table

MSWord requires that there is a paragraph mark (hard return) at the end of every document, so you may run into an issue when using tables. You will not be able to remove or delete the paragraph mark that appears after a table. An option that you can try would be to decrease the font size of that last paragraph mark (hard return) so that you can remove the blank pages in MSWord.

remove blank pages in msword

 

Happy Deleting!

 

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