We have this recurring problem where I work. I bet you have it, too.
Sometimes, our Word documents (particularly when they’ve been generated by our time & billing software) leave huge gaps of white space between a heading and the text that’s supposed to go right under it by mysteriously breaking the page right after the heading.
Except, there’s no page break! No one’s inserted a hard page break anywhere — the document’s just stubbornly refusing to put text that will clearly fit on page 1 on page 2.
What’s going on?
It’s Block Protect gone bad, that’s what. And it’s really easy to fix. So stop scratching your head and do this instead:
- Hit CNTRL-A to highlight the entire document.
- Go to Format, Paragraph.
- Click on the Line and Page Breaks tab
See how all those check marks under Pagination (Widow/Orphan control, Keep with next, Keep lines together) look grey? That means that some of your text is block protected and some isn’t.
I could lead you through the whole diagnostic process, show you the “reveal codes” view and let you see what’s happening. But, hey, we’re both in a hurry — let’s just fix the sucker and move on to bigger and better things. (I promise, I’ll do the long “here’s what’s happening” video on this later.)
- Uncheck all those boxes. You might have to click twice to get rid of the check marks.
- Click OK to go back to your document.
Voila! No more weird page breaks!
Of course, you might have to go through your document to make sure you don’t have any widows and orphans, headers at the bottoms of pages, etc., in which case you’ll want to turn block protect on for that small section of text. But at least you’ll have a clean slate to work with.
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I have been looking for solutions to this for MONTHS. I officially love you.
Perfect, this worked like a charm! Thank you so much.
I’m sorry to report that this did not work for me. Any other idea???
Does your document have any other types of breaks, like manual page breaks, section breaks, etc.? See the sequel to this post (http://legalofficeguru.com/why-your-pages-break-in-weird-places-part-two/) for some strategies for diagnosing the problem.
I’ve tried the above procedures and they don’t work. My problem usually occurs when I generate letters from a database system. However, there have been other types of documents that have the same problem.
Your database system could be generating some other kind of break, like a next page section break. This is why it’s important to use the Show/Hide button as a diagnostic tool.
This was awesome! I needed this help so badly. You just solved a problem I’ve been having for a decade! Thank you infinitely.
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