Word Document Page Deletion

[Suren Krishnan]

I have had problems with page deletion from the end of a
document with every version of Office including the
latest Office XP 2004.
When creating a document and if some lines of text goes
on to a new page (say page 16 of 16) - if this document
is saved, after deleting the text a blank page 16 remains
as part of the document. My question is "Is there any
tool or a combination of keys that could remove the blank
page 16 from the document permanently?"
Backspacing or deleting the tab returns is the only
method that I and many users have access to for this
purpose. Invariably this does not work and the blanl last
page is stored as part of the file and is printed.
This is a very time consuming and costly flaw in Word.
Surely , by now your developers would have picked up this
defect and add some better and quicketr page deletion
method either from the end or midle of a document.
There ought to be a dailog tab or a button in your Page
SetUp or Document Set Up menu to do this simple task
quickly

 

[Jon Weaver]

Suren,
The most likely answer is that even though you've deleted the text on the
last page of the document you have left behind formatting marks which are
only visible if you want them to be.

To make them visible:
Click Options on the Tools menu
Click the View tab
In the Formatting marks area, clear all the check boxes except All; make
sure All is checked
Click OK
Look in the Standard toolbar just below the menu bar and you'll see a button
that is depressed (Show/Hide ); if you performed the steps above, whenever
it's depressed you'll see all the paragraph marks, section breaks, manual
page breaks, tabs, spaces etc. that you have inserted into the document --
it is probably a combination of these formatting marks that is causing the
blank page at the end of your documents

Now you're ready to clean up the formatting marks on the last page and by
doing this you'll delete the last page:
Press CTRL+END (END while holding down CTRL) to move to the end of the
document
Press BACKSPACE to delete the formatting marks until you see that you have
deleted the blank page
Note: you can't delete the last paragraph mark in the document

I assure you that this will always (almost always) work. The major exception
is if the next to last page ends with a table and the final paragraph mark
appears on the next page, which will be blank. In that case, just set the
font size to 1 pt and you're problem will disappear.

If you're interest here is an article that explains formatting marks, which
are actually extremely useful:
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/NonPrintChars.htm

Jon

 

[Charles Kenyon]

Read Jon Weaver's comments. They explain the most likely source of your
frustration. For more, see
http://addbalance.com/usersguide/basic_formatting.htm.