Everyone who’s ever edited a document: oh there’s now a blank page at the end of this Word document, time to get rid of that!
Word: no
Everyone: please delete
Word: shan’t
Everyone: * frantically presses delete backspace delete*
Word: answer me these riddles three
So the issue comes when using tables.
Make a table cell end at the bottom of the page, and you’ll likely have a new blank page appear at the end.
The reason is because word needs a ‘new paragraph’ marker (the backwards p symbol) after the table. This delineates where the table ends - it’s part of the formatting. You can’t delete it.
Ways to get around it:
- Don’t make you’re table go to the end of the page.
- Reduce the font size of the new paragraph marker to 1 (you need to enable show formatting marks). You can probably fit this at the bottom of the page without losing much space.
(you need to enable show formatting marks)
This is the most important word processing tip of all. Mine is always on.
Does that include the dots between words instead of spaces? My colleague uses that and their documents are nigh unreadable to me at a glance
Once you start showing formatting you will also be able to see and delete “Section Breaks” more easily, which brings in another bit of Word deep magic:
Settings for sections are at the end of the section. If you delete a section break, the previous section will start using the settings of the next section.
This is especially fun for the last section of the document. If you want it to use the settings from the previous section, you have to manually “copy” the settings by editing the good section and then Redo in the bad section.
- set your bottom margin ever so slightly lower so it accommodates the light height of the blank paragraph.
Word is the fucking worst.
“Hey Word - I need to adjust the header for just this page.”
“No.”
“Can I just remove the header in this page then?”
“No”
“How about the watermark? It’s in the way on this page?”
“It’s tied to the header.”
“… I’m gonna have to make like 12 documents and combine them in Acrobat aren’t I.”
“Please log back into OneDrive.”
In case you’re in this situation in future, you can use section breaks before and after the page and give the middle section a different header/footer. It’s still not great because you can’t (to my knowledge) tie the section before to the section after so now you have to change both the first and third sections any time you want to adjust the main header/footer.
-> Show hidden characters
-> Snipe the sneaky page-breaking fucker in the pervious page
->???
-> Profit
Doesn’t always work. I had to do a lot of technical writing for docs that ended in a table for acceptance signatures. I eventually figured out how to drop the blank page at the end, but I’m not 100% convinced I didn’t summon an elder god at some point when I was fiddling with it to get there.
For the love of God and all that is holy, do NOT, I repeat, DO NOT embed a table into Word, from an Excel file, and leave it linked.
It gives you the option and it seems like it should work, so that when you update the Excel document, then later access the word document, it will update that embedded table with the new data in the linked Excel file.
Nope. It will lock up Word, Excel, your fucking computer, even if you open in safe mode and delete that table, everything is fucked.
Just delete the word doc, that Excel file, and start over without linking anything. It will be less frustrating.
It might even be less frustrating to throw the whole computer away, quit your job, divorce your wife, move to another country, learn that language and start over from scratch.
I mean it was that fucking annoying, trying to get access to that document, to even copy the text, and put in a fresh word doc.
And Google/MS Help seems to think this problem does not exist.
Except I’m the idiot that tries it the second time and the same thing happened. (For context, the first time was in college, the second time was years later, at my job. So, completely different settings, computers, versions, etc…)
Easy. Print the document. Throw away the blank last page. Scan the document. Save as Word file.
Wait, why the fuck is there still a blank page at the end?