How to Remove Page Breaks in Word 2023?

Posted on the 12 July 2023 by Jitendra Vaswani @JitendraBlogger

MS- Word is one of the most popular and customary used MS- Office functions. It is stacked with so many attributes and functions that every time you maneuver it, you come across an unaccustomed one.

How to remove page breaks in Word is one such feature, mystifying a lot of people.

In layman’s terms, a page break is the end of a page of text.

It simply authorizes the user control over where one page ends and the next one begins.

Page breaks make the customization of formatting documents simpler, so you can print them out the way you need to.

There are two types of breaks, page breaks, and section breaks.

A lot of people tend to confuse these two. Section breaks simply, split your document into sections, like headers/footers or different page numbering, etc. whereas the page breaks, separate the content written between the pages.

Page breaks can be sub-categorized into two parts: Hard page breaks and Soft page breaks.

The Soft page break is when the word processor automatically begins a new page after a page has been filled. Whereas, Hard page breaks are inserted manually by the user to separate pages.

It is also known as a forced page break.

Let’s discuss the hoopla surrounding How to Add or Remove Page Breaks in Word:

Insert a Manual Page Break

If you want the page to break, according to your requirement or at a different place, you can insert the manual page break via the following steps:

  1. Click where you want to start a new page.
  2. And, On the Insert tab, in the Pages group, click Page Break.

However, you can also insert a manual page break by pressing CTRL+ENTER.

How to Remove Page Breaks in Word

  1. Open the Word document that contains the page break you want to delete.
  2. Navigate to the page in the document that contains the page break.
  3. Click the Home tab at the top of the window and click the Show/Hide button in the Paragraph section of the ribbon at the top of the window.

  1. With the mouse, highlight the Page Break object, and press the Delete key. This will restore the information back to the original page.

Now, the formatting information on the page can be really distracting. In order to get rid of this, click the Show/Hide button again.

Removing Page Breaks using Find and Replace

Find and Replace is the most commonly used method to remove page breaks, as it helps saves a lot of time. Take a look at How do you remove a page break in Word?

  1. Click on the Home tab. On the extreme right, you will see a Replace tab. Click on that tab.
  2. A Find and Replace dialog box appears, click More>> button to show more options.
  3. Place the cursor in the Find What field, and from the Special pull-down menu, select the option Manual Page Break.
  4. You will see a “^m” character in the Find What field, and click Replace All.

Removing Page Breaks using Kutools

Kutools for Word provides handy tools to simplify your work in Microsoft Word.

It is a handy, add-in feature that makes it easy for you to process frequent operations. By using Kutools, you can simply remove page breaks from the document. Let’s have a look at the steps:

  1. Click the Kutools tab on the Word. Next, click on the tab Breaks and then eventually click on Remove Page Breaks.
  2. Now, once you click remove page breaks, all the page breaks in the whole document or the page breaks you have selected, will be removed. It is the simplest way out.

Dealing with Automatic Page Breaks

Automatic page breaks cannot be removed; they can only be adjusted at your convenience.

You can adjust them to keep specific paragraphs or lines together. Take a look:

  1. Simply, highlight the paragraphs you want to keep together.
  2. Drag to the Layout tab, you will see a small icon of the expanded options in the paragraph settings, Click on this icon.
  3. Under the Line and Page Breaks tab, select one or more of these options. Basically, with all these options, you can control pagination in a word document. These are:
  • Widow/Orphan Control: The last line of a paragraph by itself at the top of a page is known as a widow. The first line of a paragraph by itself at the bottom of a page is known as an orphan. This feature ensures that the first or last line of a paragraph is not left on a page alone. With this, at least two lines will always be kept together on each page.
  • Keep with next: It will keep the paragraph on the same page as the next paragraph. Now, this stands really useful for keeping headings and the body of the paragraph on the same page.
  • Keep lines together:  It will keep all the lines of the paragraph on the same page.
  • Page break before this tab ensures that the paragraph starts on a new page.

Prevent page breaks in a table row

A professionally designed document is always neat, with properly allocated rows and columns to a well-designed table.

Page breaks in table row dilute the whole purpose and are quite diverting.

Let’s see how you can prevent page breaks in a table row:

  1. Select the entire table or the particular row that you don’t want to break.
  2. On the Table Tools tab, click Layout. Select the Properties tab.
  3. Go to the Row tab, clear the Allow row to break across pages check box, click OK.

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Conclusion | How to Remove Page Breaks in Word 2023?

Page breaks can be inserted anywhere in the document.

However, while working on a lengthy document, manual page breaks can prove to be a tedious task.

To avoid any such grueling situation, use the stated above options for automatic page breaks.

The elemental problem is that most people are not aware of these in-built functions.

How to remove page breaks in Word is one such function. Once you get to know the trick, this task becomes simpler.

So, take a look at all the above-stated options thoroughly. Take advantage of all these functions and enjoy working on MS- Word like never before!