Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Word 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Word, click here: Deleting a Range of Pages.
Suppose you have a document of 50 pages and you want to delete pages 10 to 15. You may wonder if there is a way to delete that range with a single action.
Not with a single action, no. The reason is because Word technically knows nothing about pages. Page designations are very fluid, depending on all sorts of variables such as the amount of text in a document, what formatting is applied, and which printer driver is being used.
That being said, there is a relatively easy way to delete pages 10 to 15. Follow these steps:
Even though this process is noted here as 8 steps, it really is quite quick to perform. I was able to perform them in less than 5 seconds, which is a pretty fast way to get rid of a group of pages.
Another way to approach the task is to use the Zoom control to set a very small zoom factor. If you set something like 10% or 20%, you should see a number of pages on the screen at the same time. You can then use the mouse to easily select the pages you want to delete and then delete them.
If you haven't caught on to the idea yet, in Word you need to select text (not pages) and then delete the text. Thus, another way to quickly select the text that comprises pages 10 through 15 is to jump to the beginning of page 10 and make sure the insertion point is there. Then, click on the "thumb button" on the vertical scroll bar at the right of the window and drag it until you see that it is on page 15. As you hold the Shift key, click at the point on the page where you want your text selection to end. You can then delete the selection.
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (7161) 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: Deleting a Range of Pages.
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2019-01-30 03:19:14
Stan
Nothing suggested on this page works for me. I've tried them all!
2019-01-26 04:51:49
Aline
Sorry this didn't work for me. It deleted the contents but not the format or the pages. Is there another way? Thank you, Aline
2019-01-15 15:14:22
Barbara
Mr. Wyatt, thank you for saving me a ton of time and needless work with your very quick and easy to follow tip!
2019-01-10 02:35:42
David
Mr. Wyatt,
Your instructions and tips are life savers!!
2018-12-23 15:16:22
Frank
Works like a charm! (Word 2013.)
2018-10-10 04:35:31
Chris O'Leary
Nice, shouldn't be this hard, but hey, Microsoft innit!
2018-08-23 12:31:03
annb
This still works perfectly with Word 2016! Thanks so much.
2018-08-07 18:10:16
Andrew
F5 did absolutely nothing?
2018-07-29 15:15:55
Kudret
Thank you for the tip Mr Wyatt. This helped me just in time.
2018-06-22 21:45:36
SEB
Thanks for the help. This worked well for me.
2018-05-29 17:08:03
Tiffany
Thank you so much! I was about to pull my hair out.
2018-04-17 19:09:09
kelpso
Thank you!
2018-02-01 09:02:44
ako
thanks!
2017-11-20 12:33:05
Yaru
Really helpful tip! Bravo!
2017-09-17 21:10:32
Diamond
Very useful tip, thank you so much.
2017-08-30 05:35:16
Abhinav
Excellent tip, thanks a lot!
2017-07-15 12:38:49
Hello Mr. Wyatt,
A few weeks ago I was doing the final edits in Word on a Bible-based life coach book that I've written and while it was open, Mozilla freaked out and opened almost 100 windows. After much frustration in not being able to regain control of my computer, I decided to let it be and go make dinner only to return 45 minutes later and find that my book now had almost 1,000 blank pages added to it! (And no, I didn't leave anything lying on the keyboard pressing "Enter".)
I went to View then Thumbnails to try and delete and it wouldn't work at all. I then reached out to two friends that I believe to be savvier than me in Word and they didn't know how to mass delete blank pages.
I looked up online video and article tutorials and not one of them worked, until I found you yesterday!
BLESS YOU DEAR MAN! This article of yours was the solution and I could NOT be anymore grateful!
After following your very well done instructions, I emailed this page to each of my friends and told them to save it for their future reference because it fixed my issue in about 90 seconds. (It would've been even faster than that if I did it all at once but I did it in sections to be sure I didn't delete pages that I didn't want deleted.)
Thank you so much for your excellent instructions and desperately needed help!
2017-07-12 11:27:17
Erica
This works! It kept my page breaks and did not disturb my header/footers and page numbers. Thank you thank you thank you!!!! :-D
2017-01-26 08:23:03
Paybey01
Excellent help - massively appreciated to save so much time!
2016-12-27 08:12:11
zarvan
this article was so useful for me as a translator. thank you very much
2016-12-18 13:24:54
Noam Fishman
Thanks! A very helpful tip. Great job explaining it.
2016-11-17 18:28:47
Rob Conger
Genius! Extend mode! The kind of thing I knew in 1998 and totally forgot about! Thank you!
2016-11-17 00:51:31
C venugopal
The information was really useful.
2016-11-09 11:21:54
AS
I have a document created by someone else that has different headers on different pages. When I delete the last three pages it applies the header that was on the last page to EVERY PAGE IN THE DOCUMENT even though I deleted that page. That last page is also landscape orientation (the rest of the document is portrait. When I delete it, it also flips some or all of the pages to landscape. How do I just make it GO AWAY?
2016-09-23 04:55:37
kkkiio
Thanks a lot!
2016-08-30 05:35:06
Siamak
oh, thanks a lot. I ound it very useful.
further more is there any possibility that I can ask some questions directly her?
2016-07-20 01:01:46
Hadi
Excellent,
I owe you a myriad thanks...
2016-06-30 09:30:15
Scholes
Wow....saved me a great deal. Thanks big time.
2016-06-06 01:39:18
nagarajan
fantastic.thank you.
2016-05-28 06:45:30
Antony Henry
Special Thanks
2016-04-14 13:44:49
Wendy
I cannot thank you enough!
2016-02-28 09:10:40
Helen
This deletes everything on the pages. I want the contents but I just want to suppress certain page numbers within the full document, such as at blank pages, etc.
2016-02-18 08:08:53
Z. Hristov
It's great.Very nice of you!
Thank you very much!!
2016-01-21 10:14:39
Marsha
Thanks this worked great!
2015-12-10 20:11:51
Mike G.
I've always had trouble deleting a single page in the midst of a document. I would just print it out and throw away the page I didn't want. However, if I wanted to send the document electronically, I obviously couldn't do this. I had been searching the internet for a solution and got all kinds of very technical advice with many steps that i found very difficult to follow!
THEN IT DAWNED ON ME!!! For example, if you want to delete page 7 of a 15 page document, simply open a new BLANK document, copy and paste pages 1-6 into the new document; then go back and copy and paste pages 8-15 into the new document! DUH! Page 7 gone!!! Save the new doc and throw the other one into the trash!
2015-11-12 04:01:13
Martin
Very helpful!
2015-11-11 19:13:55
JF
THANK YOU!!!!!!!!
This was the only online help that actually deleted the page!!!
2015-11-08 17:17:05
mohamed
thanks a lot for this explanation ...i was in urgent need to do this.
2015-10-29 14:21:03
Matt H.
Great, I had a 3,000 page document created when I did a mail merge. This took care of deleting all those empty templated pages.
2015-09-23 09:54:27
Slogging thru legal docs
I had hundreds of pages to delete in multiple documents, THANKS!
2015-08-23 03:02:23
Yug#
Thank You so much sir....
It's very useful tip. Helped me a lot.
2015-08-11 16:23:00
Chris
Wen Mac, do you have change tracking turned on? That's what happens so a reviewer can see what someone deleted. Go to the Review tab and see if it's turned on.
2015-07-09 15:41:09
Wen Mac
All it did for me was cross everything out. Nothing deleted at all. :(
2015-06-21 15:25:59
Franck
Took me more than 30 minutes on the word help tab to figure this thing out. Thank you so much for the helpful tip...
Shame on Microsoft.... this is ridiculous to make it this hard to simply delete pages...
2015-06-16 13:13:31
Ashley
SUPER helpful!
2015-06-16 10:42:38
Nikki
Thank you very much
2015-05-25 20:48:11
Nighat
Thank you so much helped me a lot with my work
2015-05-06 01:22:16
Prashant
This was really helpful, awesome!
2015-04-16 06:39:09
John
it was suggest able for others
2015-04-16 06:37:58
Giridhar
Thanks , it was helped alot
2015-04-10 10:38:35
kathy I
hi! i accidentally had an item on my return button for 390 pages. This tip worked great! Yes! Thanks!
2015-03-02 06:53:06
Stefi
Is it possible to delete every other page on a word document without having to delete them one by one? (for instance page 1, page 3, page 5, page 6, etc...)
2015-01-14 14:38:52
Alex
Thank you so much! We are a non-profit agency and you just made our day!
2015-01-04 23:05:50
I have a document that includes an envelope and a 8.5x11 sheet. I use it often and "save as" when I modify it.
The envelope is page 0 (zero), and the sheet is page 2. When I print all, a blank sheet is printed as page 1.
There is no blank page. I can see only the envelope and the one sheet. If I print pages 0, 2 it's fine.
How can I delete the invisible page 1?
2014-11-07 11:54:39
Mike
Awesome, Dude!
2014-09-30 03:31:43
n ganesh reddy
thank you.. it was really helpfull
2014-09-17 16:17:51
God
very good son
2014-09-17 12:44:50
Shameer
how to delete a range of pages with header,footer & tables ?
2014-09-05 15:52:09
loe
Thanks for posting!
2014-08-20 14:44:46
Louanne
Do you know how long it took me to find wrong answers to how to delete multiple pages in word prior to finding your correct solution? Thank you so much.
2014-08-18 13:50:07
Rea
OMG! Thank you! So much! I had a report due and it was 6 pages long. However, it was over 3000 pages of a complete mess. This was simple and helped me perfectly at first try!
2014-07-23 09:50:33
big guy
This tip was very helpful! I'll be buying your book because of this one tip!
2014-07-20 14:13:14
Ishan Agarwal
Many Thanks......This Helps A lot......... Good Work and Thanks Again!!
2014-06-12 11:18:44
dan
this works. thanks for posting.
2014-05-29 17:42:19
jumzy
thanks, really helped
2014-03-31 22:44:02
simon
great - saved me hours of manual work
2013-09-12 15:28:05
The Word Lady
Awesome, thank you - been highlighting a scrolling to delete for years!
2013-04-04 11:20:14
college student
thank you thank you thank you. this is so simple and it saved me so much time on a big paper I was editing
2013-03-11 06:46:10
Word User
Very helpful tip- many thanks for sharing
2012-09-23 05:24:00
Peter J Moran
Hi Allen,
I also find your tip for Deleting the Current Page very useful:
http://word.tips.net/T000227_Deleting_a_Page.html
Peter Moran
Got a version of Word that uses the menu interface (Word 97, Word 2000, Word 2002, or Word 2003)? This site is for you! If you use a later version of Word, visit our WordTips site focusing on the ribbon interface.
FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in WordTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."
Copyright © 2019 Sharon Parq Associates, Inc.
Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Word 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Word, click here: 
Comments