Word 2013 For Dummies
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As you type your document, Word 2013 adds new, blank pages for you to write on. These pages are appended to the end of the document, the extra pages keep appearing so that no text is lost and nothing falls off the edge. That's all normal and good.

For those times when you need to stick a blank page in the middle of a document, or when you want to start your text at the top of a new page, Word provides two interesting commands.

Start on a new page

To start typing on a new page in your document, you insert a manual page break, or hard page break. The simplest way to do this is to press the Ctrl+Enter key combination. Word then begins a new page On That Very Spot. All text before the insertion pointer is on the previous page, and all text afterward is on a new page.

You can also insert a hard page break by choosing the Page Break command from the Pages group on the Insert tab. If you don’t see the Pages group, click the Pages button to choose the Page Break command.

Keep these points in mind when you’re dealing with hard page breaks:

  • Never, never, never start a new page by repeatedly pressing the Enter key until a new page pops up. That just leads to trouble later as you edit your document.

  • Pressing Ctrl+Enter inserts a hard page-break character into your document. That character stays there, always creating a hard page break no matter how much you edit the text on previous pages.

  • You can delete a hard page break by pressing either the Backspace or Delete key. If you do this accidentally, just press Ctrl+Z to undelete.

  • You can see the hard page-break character if you use the Show/Hide command, found in the Paragraph group on the Home tab. (It’s the ¶ button.) The hard page break appears as a dotted line with the text Page Break in the middle.

How to insert a whole, blank page

To shove a fresh, blank sheet of paper into the middle of a document, use the Blank Page command button, found in the Insert tab's Pages group. This command inserts two hard page breaks into a document, which creates a blank sheet of paper.

Don’t use this command unless you truly need a blank page in the midst of a document and you don’t plan to write on that page. Putting graphics on the page is fine. Adding a table or any other single-page element to the blank page is also fine. But because the blank page is inserted by using two hard page breaks, writing on it leads to formatting woes later.

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