You have finished typing a perfectly formatted five-page report in Microsoft Word. You go to print it, but notice that the total page count is six. Page six is completely, inexplicably blank. No matter how many times you place your cursor at the bottom of page five and press the ‘Delete’ key, that stubbornly blank page refuses to disappear. This occurs because Microsoft Word documents are filled with invisible formatting marks—paragraph returns, section breaks, and page breaks—that dictate the structure of the document. A blank page exists because one of these invisible marks has been pushed onto a new page, forcing Word to render it. To delete the blank page, you must reveal the invisible matrix of your document and manually delete the offending code.
Step 1: Revealing the Invisible Marks
You cannot delete what you cannot see. The first step is to turn on Word’s diagnostic view.
- Navigate to the Home tab on the ribbon at the top of the screen.
- Look in the Paragraph group (near the center).
- Click the button that looks like a backward ‘P’ (this is the Pilcrow symbol: \u00b6).
Your document will instantly fill with blue formatting marks. You will see dots between words (representing spaces) and the \u00b6 symbol at the end of every paragraph (representing where you pressed the Enter key).
Scenario 1: The Hidden Paragraph Returns (The Most Common Cause)
Scroll down to your stubbornly blank final page. You will likely see several \u00b6 symbols sitting on the page.
This happens because you pressed the Enter key too many times at the end of your document, generating empty paragraphs that spilled onto a new sheet of paper.
- The Fix: Simply use your mouse to highlight all those empty \u00b6 symbols on the blank page, and press the Delete or Backspace key. Once the last symbol is deleted, the blank page will instantly vanish.
Scenario 2: The Explicit Page Break
If you scroll to the bottom of the last page of text (before the blank page), you might see a dotted line containing the words: —–Page Break—–.
This means you (or a colleague) pressed Ctrl+Enter, explicitly commanding Word to create a new page, regardless of what text followed it.
- The Fix: Click your mouse directly to the left of the dotted line so your cursor is blinking right next to the words “Page Break.” Press the Delete key. The explicit break is destroyed, and the blank page vanishes.
Scenario 3: The Un-deletable Table Margin
This is the most frustrating scenario. If the very last item on your document is a Table, Word is hard-coded to require a blank paragraph after the table. If your table extends to the absolute very bottom of the page, that mandatory paragraph is forced onto a new blank page, and you cannot delete it.
- The Fix: You cannot delete the final \u00b6 mark, but you can make it infinitesimally small. Highlight that final \u00b6 mark on the blank page. Go to the Home tab, click the Font Size box, type the number 1, and press Enter. The paragraph mark shrinks so small that it can now fit on the bottom margin of the previous page, sucking the blank page out of existence.