We’ve all been there… You’ve poured hours into putting together the perfect CV in Microsoft Word. Or the perfect report, or the perfect cover letter for a funding application, or the perfect invite to little Cassandra’s fifth birthday.
The type of Word document doesn’t matter… The keyword here is ‘perfect’!
Everything is laid out just right. Every word, every graphical element is in the right place. Deleting even a single word or changing the page margins by even a millimetre (or micro inch or whatever the imperial unit is that most closely resembles a millimetre) will ruin that document’s perfection.
…if only you could get rid of that goddamn blank page that has inserted itself at the very end of the document and just does not want to go away unless you make one of those changes above and ruin the perfection of said document.
Why is there a blank page at the end of my Word document?
We can’t tell you why – programmatically speaking – Microsoft has decided that a blank page at the end of a Word document is ok sometimes, or why they haven’t given us a surefire way of getting rid of them.
But, what’s happening, is that there is always a paragraph break at the end of a Word document, no matter what you do in terms of content in that document.
Sometimes, when your content takes up absolutely all space on the last page (or what you intended to be the last page, rather), that compulsory paragraph break at the end gets pushed onto the next page. And because that paragraph break is compulsory, there is no way to get rid of it. And voila, you are left with a blank page.
But, we hear you say, stop the rambling and tell me how to get rid of that annoying blank page… Okay, okay… we just needed to cover the SEO basics first. But here you go… We have a way simple solution that should work 99% of the time:
Solution time… How to get rid of that blank page at the end of Word documents
(See what we did there… Have to pay heed to the algorithm of search results and insert keyword stuffed headings. Moving on…)
The quickest and easiest way to get rid of the blank last page in Microsoft Word is so quick and easy that we are beating ourselves up for not having realised sooner… Here are the step by step instructions:
- Turn on text formatting marks in Word… Look for the button with a ¶ in the Word toolbar and click it.
- Go to the blank last page of your document. There should be a single ¶ at the top of the page. (If not, delete the additional ¶s.)
- Click on the single ¶ at the top of the page.
- Now, set the font size to 1.
- Done! The blank last page is gone! (Because there will almost always be room for a font-size 1 line on the previous page.
But, and there is a but here… This method will work most of the time. In fact, we’re pretty sure it will work in at least 99% of cases. However, there’s always that one percent chance that there actually isn’t enough room for even a tiny font-size 1 line on what you intended to be the last page.
In that case, sorry… You really will need to make some adjustments to the design/layout/content of the page so as to fit in that last, tiny little paragraph break.
