I really thought that folks had stopping using Enter to force the contents of their document to the next page. But then I had to review a document a reader had sent to me and sure enough, it was chock full of forced lines at the bottom of several pages. When other people open this document the problem is that things will not always be where the original creator intended. A user’s default printer has some control over a Word document and if another system must rework fonts or spacing, the document could look very, very different! Although this could drive someone around the bend, it is very easily fixed.
Follow the steps below to learn how:
As you are creating your document, there may be certain types of paragraphs that should always begin at the top of a page. For instance, you may have a certain paragraph format that you use for section headings. Your page design calls for all sections to begin at the top of a page, so you must come up with a way to ensure this always happens.
There are a couple of ways you can do this. The first is to search for each section heading and manually insert a page break before each of the heads. This can take a lot of time and you know how I feel about wasting time and keystrokes! It is much easier to format the paragraph so it always begins on a new page.
- Place your cursor in the section head paragraph.
- Make sure the Home tab of your Ribbon is displayed.
- Click the small icon at the bottom-right of the Paragraph group to display the dialog box.
- Display the Line and Page Breaks tab.
- Make sure Page Break Before is selected.
- Click on .
Using page breaks before your section heads is even more automatic if you use a style. All you need to do is format the style so that the head will always have a page break before it. Then, every time you use that heading style, Word will insert the requisite page break.