Leaving Even Pages Blank

If you are preparing a training manual or some other type of workbook, you may want to leave every other page in the manual blank. For instance, you might want your training materials on the odd-numbered pages and all your even-numbered pages to be blank so that users can write on those pages, take notes, or do assignments.

Word provides no automatic way to do this; there is no command to only print on odd or even pages. Instead, you will need to insert breaks to demarcate the ends of your pages. In this way you could leave the blank pages you need.

For instance, let's say that you wanted to leave even-numbered pages blank. In your document, locate the end of the first page of the document. Then, insert a section break just before the paragraph in which the page ends. (This way the paragraph will start at the top of the new page.) Make sure that the section break you enter is "Section Break (Odd Page)." That way the new section will start on the next odd-numbered page in the print-out.

Using this approach means that there will only need to be one break at the end of each page. It also means that the blank pages inserted by Word will not have page numbers, headers, or footers on them. If this is important to you, then you should not insert section breaks between pages. Instead, insert a page break, press Enter once or twice, and then insert another page break.

Either of these methods is relatively easy to implement in short documents. If you are working with longer documents then inserting the requisite section or page breaks can become quite tedious over time. Unfortunately, there is no way around this manual processing of the document, short of creating a macro to do the desired insertions.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (3402) 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: Leaving Even Pages Blank.