Question

 

Affirm that you know what whitespace is and that you will avoid submitting documents that have large sections of blank pages.

Answer 1

There are two ways to insert page breaks in Microsoft Word: manually insert a page break, or modify a style to start on a new page. I’ll show you how to insert a manual page break, then show you how to delete the white space without breaking your layout.

Inserting page breaks

Follow these steps to insert the page breaks:

1. Open your document, then insert the cursor at the end of the line before the section you want to start on a new page.
2. In the ribbon on the Insert tab, find the Page group.
3. Click Page Break.
   
4. Repeat this process for each section.

Once you are finished, you may need to do some additional clean up on your document.

Removing white space

As you can see in this sample document, there is a big chunk of white space that needs to be removed after creating the new page. This is most likely caused by improper use of carriage returns, tabs, and spaces to format the document.

You need to delete the breaks that are causing layout problems. The only way to delete the breaks without accidentally changing your formatting is to be able to see what you’re doing.

Press Ctrl + * (Ctrl + Shift + 8). This activates the Show All toggle.

Now we see why the second section is located too far down the page! There are three extra line breaks, a section break, over two lines of tabs, and a bunch of spaces that were inserted with the space bar.

This is very common so it is good to know how to fix the problem.

First, look at the two headings. Do you see the blue paragraph symbol after each one? That is where the style information for the heading is stored. If you cut and paste the text, make sure to keep the style information with it or you will lose your formatting. In other words, highlight the whole line including the hidden character before you cut or copy.

Now you can carefully delete all of the extra characters. Highlight all of them, then press Delete on you keyboard.

Press Ctrl + * to Hide All.

Your document should look like the following:

If you need to reapply Heading 2, follow these steps:

1. Highlight the heading text or insert your cursor within the text.
2. On the Home tab, in the Styles group, click Heading 2.
   
3. Press Ctrl + S to save.

Now you have a nice clean document.