What is used to separate the first page from the last page in Word?

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.

(If you are having trouble seeing your section breaks try going to the View tab of the Ribbon and switch to Draft mode. This way, you will have a clear picture of where the page breaks are, as they will be represented by long, dotted lines.)

*Reference URL: https://nhls.azurewebsites.net/blog/how-to-delete-an-unwanted-blank-page-in-microsoft-word *

Important Note: 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 breaks to a Continuous section break:

  1. Place your cursor after the section break you want to change
  2. Go to the Layout tab on the Ribbon
  3. Click the Page Setup dialog launcher
  4. On the Layout tab of the Page Setup dialog box, click the Section start drop down and select Continuous.

What is used to separate the first page from the last page in Word?


That should remove your blank page without affecting your formatting.

Hopefully, some of the steps above helped you remove that unwanted page in your Word document. Now you can move on to much more important tasks!

Are you having trouble getting rid of a pesky blank page in your document? Learn how to remove a blank page in Word using a few different methods.

Word formatting isn’t always friendly. Depending on your margins and layout, it’s not uncommon for blank pages to appear that seem to be undeletable. Luckily, that’s not really the case. Try these two methods to remove blank pages in your Word documents.

Make the paragraph fit on the previous page.

The most common reason for pesky blank pages in a Word document is because the “paragraph” on the blank page doesn’t fit on the page before it. When there’s no space for another line, Word pushes it to the following page. No matter how many times you try to backspace, there’s simply no room, and the blank page remains.

A workaround for this problem is to change the font size on the blank page’s paragraph. Here’s how:

  1. Press ctrl+shift+8 (cmd+8 for Mac) to reveal the paragraph marks.
  2. Select the paragraph mark on the blank page you want to remove.
  3. Click in the Font size box, type 01, and press the Enter key.

It will remove the blank page and shrink the paragraph to fit on the previous page. You can then press ctrl+shift+8 (or cmd+8) to hide the paragraph marks again.

If you’d rather take fewer steps to remove a blank page in Word, you can use a PDF editor like Adobe Acrobat online services to actually extract PDF pages online. Just save your Word document as a PDF (blank page and all) and follow these steps:

  1. Go to the PDF editor website.
  2. Upload your file.
  3. Select the blank page you want to extract.
  4. Download the new PDF file.

When you open the new PDF, the blank page will have magically disappeared. It won’t bother you ever again.

Microsoft Word provides you with the option of selecting a numbering style (e.g. “Roman Numeral”, “Arabic”) and gives you the option of selecting the “starting at” number.  You can set the page numbers for your entire document, or if you need more control, you can do it section-by-section as well.

If you want continuous pagination that is all in the same format, go to the Insert Ribbon, and in the Header & Footer Group, click on the Page Number icon. Choose the appropriate placement of the number and a style.

If you are writing a Rackham dissertation, you have somewhat more complicated pagination. For example, Rackham’s guidelines require that the page numbers begin on the the third or fourth page of your document (depending on if you include a graphical frontispiece) and the page number on that page should be Roman numeral “ii”. Page numbering should continue on in roman numerals until the first page of Chapter 1 is reached.  At that point, the numbering should restart in Arabic (“1, 2, 3…”). Rackham requires that all of your page numbers be placed at the bottom center of your pages.

To accomplish this, we are going to divide the document into different “sections”, break them apart (so they can have different page number formatting), and then add the page numbers.

How page break is used?

Page breaks are used to end a page without filling it with text. To make sure the title page of your thesis/dissertation is separate from the signature page, for example, insert a page break after the graduation date on the title page.

What is the use of page break tool in MS Word?

A page break is a special marker that will end the current page and start a new one. Click to place your cursor where you want to start a new page. Click the Insert tab. If necessary, expand the Pages group by clicking it.