Eliminate unwanted blank Word pages with pagination formatting

You just sent your Word document to a colleague in another office. When she prints out the document on her computer, the pages break at odd places; it even prints out a blank page in the middle of the document. When you print it out on your printer, however, it prints perfectly. What could have caused these pagination errors? Different printers paginate differently. You can avoid many of these pagination errors by eliminating manual page breaks in your document. Instead, use pagination formatting.

For example, to type a bibliography on its own page, you could click after the last paragraph of your document and press [Ctrl][Enter] to set a manual page break — or, to use pagination formatting, follow these steps:

1. Begin typing your bibliography in the line immediately after the last paragraph of your document.
   
2. Click in the first line of your bibliography.
   
3. Go to Format | Paragraph. (In Word 2007, click the Home tab, and then in the Paragraph group, click the Dialog Launcher.)
   
4. In the Paragraph dialog box, click on the Line And Page Breaks tab.
   
5. Click the Page Break Before check box, then click OK.
   

Pagination formatting also lets you keep two paragraphs together on the same page, as well as all lines of a single paragraph on the same page. To use pagination formatting to keep all lines of a paragraph together, follow these steps:

1. Click in the paragraph.
   
2. Go to Format | Paragraph. (In Word 2007, click the Home tab, and then in the Paragraph group, click the Dialog Launcher.)
   
3. In the Paragraph dialog box, click the Line And Page Breaks tab.
   
4. Click the Keep Lines Together check box, then click OK.
   

To keep two paragraphs together on the same page, follow these steps:

1. Click in the paragraph.
   
2. Go to Format | Paragraph. (In Word 2007, click the Home tab, and then in the Paragraph group, click the Dialog Launcher.)
   
3. In the Paragraph dialog box, click the Line And Page Breaks tab.
   
4. Click the Keep With Next check box, then click OK.