Blank Page Printing after Table at End of Document

Albert has a problem with one of his documents. It appears that there is a table at the end of the document, and that table extends to the very end of the page. When he prints the document, Word always prints an extra blank page after the document.

This is caused by the fact that there is always (no exception) a blank paragraph after a table when that table appears at the end of a document. You can't get rid of this extra paragraph; it marks the end of the document and contains much of the formatting for the document itself. It is this extra paragraph mark that is "spilling over" to the next page and resulting in the blank page on the printout.

There are a few ways you can stop the extra page from printing, however. First, an obvious solution is to not print the last page. For instance, if Word shows there are 11 pages in the document, only print pages 1 through 10.

Another solution is to format the final paragraph mark so that it is very small. Select it (you may need to turn on the display of non-printing characters to see it) and then format it so that there is no space before it and so it is a 1-point font size. In most instances, this will "pull up" the paragraph mark so it appears at the bottom of the last page.

You can also try selecting the final paragraph mark and formatting it using the hidden text attribute. It may still show on the screen, but as long as you have Word configured so it doesn't print hidden text, then it won't take any room on the printout.

You could also adjust the bottom margin on the page so that it is smaller. This works best if your document is a one-page document and you want to get rid of the second page. It may not work so well in multi-page documents, unless you put in a section break near the end of the document to change just the margin on the final page.

There are also things you can probably do to your table—the one on the last page. For instance, you could perhaps widen a column or two, which may cause the text in the table to reflow and take less vertical space. You could also decrease the height of some of the rows in the table, or edit out a word or two so that the text reflows.

You can find out some additional information at this page:

http://wordfaqs.mvps.org/BlankPage.htm

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (570) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Blank Page Printing after Table at End of Document.