How to stop pages from breaking after the first line of a paragraph in microsoft word

Lori Kaufman
Lori Kaufman
Writer

Lori Kaufman is a technology expert with 25 years of experience. She’s been a senior technical writer, worked as a programmer, and has even run her own multi-location business. Read more.

In typesetting terms, “widows” and “orphans” are lines at the end or beginning of a paragraph that are separated from the rest of the paragraph by a page break. If you think widows and orphans in your Word document are distracting, you can enable a setting that prevents them.

So, which is which? A widow is the last line of a paragraph that appears by itself on the following page and an orphan is the first line of a paragraph that appears by itself at the bottom of a page. You may see some disagreement online about these definitions, but the Chicago Manual of Style uses these definitions. Widows and orphans also occur at the ends and beginnings of columns, as well as pages.

If you have trouble remembering, think of it this way: “An orphan is alone from the beginning; a widow is alone at the end”. Orphaned lines appear at the “birth” (start) of paragraphs and widowed lines appear at the “death” (end) of paragraphs.

To control widows and orphans in Word, open your document and place the cursor in the paragraph with the widow or orphan. Make sure the “Home” tab is active and click the “Paragraph Settings” button in the lower-right corner of the Paragraph section.

On the Paragraph dialog box, click the “Line and Page Breaks” tab.

Under Pagination, check the ‘Widow/Orphan control” box and then click “OK”.

In the case of an orphan, like in our example at the beginning of this article, the single first line of the paragraph moves to the next page to be joined with the rest of the paragraph. If the paragraph had a widow, the whole rest of the paragraph is moved to the next page to rejoin the last line.

Widow and orphan control is applied separately for each paragraph. You cannot control only the widow or only the orphan for a paragraph. When you turn on widow and orphan control for a paragraph, neither widows nor orphans will occur for that paragraph when the document repaginates. You could turn on this setting in your paragraph styles in a Word template so you don’t have to worry about applying it manually.

Using widow and orphan control can frequently cause extra blank lines to appear at the bottom of a page or column. This is normal because lines have to be moved to get rid of the widow or orphan. Whether you enable the widow/orphan control setting or not is a matter of which one bothers you most, widows and orphans or the blank lines. Or, maybe you’re following a style guide that mandates no widows and orphans. Widows and orphans can be distracting, but widows can be more so because they are at the end of a paragraph, and the last line of a paragraph can be any length, even a single word. So, you could end up with one word on a line by itself at the beginning of a page.

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Lori Kaufman
Lori Kaufman is a technology expert with 25 years of experience. She’s been a senior technical writer, worked as a programmer, and has even run her own multi-location business.
Read Full Bio »

You can control where Word and Outlook position automatic page breaks by setting pagination options.

Keep lines of a paragraph together on a page or in a column

Select the paragraphs that contain lines you want to keep together.

On the Home tab in Word, or on the FORMAT TEXT tab in an Outlook email, select the Paragraph Dialog Box launcher .

Select the Line and Page Breaks tab.

Under Pagination, select Keep lines together.

Keep paragraphs together on a page or in a column

Select the paragraphs you want to keep together on a page.

On the Home tab in Word, or on the FORMAT TEXT tab in an Outlook email, select the Paragraph Dialog Box launcher .

Select the Line and Page Breaks tab.

Under Pagination, select Keep with next.

Always force a page break before a paragraph

Select the paragraph that you want to follow the page break.

On the Home tab in Word, or on the FORMAT TEXT tab in an Outlook email, select the Paragraph Dialog Box launcher .

Select the Line and Page Breaks tab.

Under Pagination, select Page break before.

Control widow and orphan lines

Select the paragraphs in which you want to control widows and orphans.

On the Home tab in Word, or on the FORMAT TEXT tab in an Outlook email, select the Paragraph Dialog Box launcher .

Select the Line and Page Breaks tab.

Under Pagination, select Widow/Orphan control.

Note: This option is turned on by default.

Suppress line numbers from a paragraph or paragraphs

Select the paragraph or paragraphs.

On the Home tab in Word, or on the FORMAT TEXT tab in an Outlook email, select the Paragraph Dialog Box launcher .

Select the Line and Page Breaks tab.

Under Formatting, select Suppress line numbers.

Remove hyphens from a paragraph or paragraphs

Select the paragraph or paragraphs.

On the Home tab in Word, or on the FORMAT TEXT tab in an Outlook email, select the Paragraph Dialog Box launcher .

Select the Line and Page Breaks tab.

Under Formatting, select Don’t hyphenate.

Text box options

You can use the text box options to more tightly wrap the text that surrounds the text box. To use these options, the text box border must be transparent (no line and no fill), and the Wrap Text must be set at Tight or Through.

Inside the text box, right-click, and then select Paragraph.

Select the Line and Page Breaks tab.

Under Textbox options, in the Tight wrap list, select one of the following:

To stop words from splitting across lines in a paragraph or paragraphs by turning off automatic hyphenation:

1. Select the paragraph or paragraphs.
2. Click the Home tab in the Ribbon.
3. Click the dialog box launcher on the bottom right corner of the Paragraph group.
4. Click Line and Page Breaks.
5. Select or check Don’t Hyphenate.

How do you do a nonbreaking hyphen?

The answer to this dilemma is to use non-breaking hyphens instead of regular dashes when you don’t want Word to break a line at the hyphen. To do this, hold down the Ctrl and Shift keys as you type the dash (this is the same as typing Ctrl and an underscore).

How do I turn off automatic hyphenation?

Word: Turn off automatic hyphenation

1. Go to the Page Layout tab > Page Setup group.
2. Click Hyphenation.
3. Select None.

How do I turn on automatic hyphenation in Word?

Use Word’s automatic hyphenation option to present your clients with a visually appealing document that displays evenly spaced words.

1. Click the “Page Layout” tab and locate the Page Setup section.
2. Click “Hyphenation” and then “Automatic.” The document text is hyphenated.

How do I turn off hyphenation in pages?

1. Click the word while holding down the Control key. 2. Then choose Never Hyphenate or Allow Hyphenation from the shortcut menu.

What is the rule for paragraph hyphenation?

It is generally considered acceptable to have two consecutive hyphenated lines, but no more. In addition, be careful not to have too many hyphenations in a paragraph, even if they are not in successive rows. The paragraph on the left has an unsightly seven hyphens in a row!

What is ligatures in pages?

You can use ligatures, a decorative joining of two characters to form a single typographic character, to affect character spacing. You can use ligatures in your document if the font you’re using supports them.

How do you do speech marks on a Mac?

Single quotation marks on a Mac Press-and-hold down the Option key and then press the curly parentheses > key found near the return key for the opening single quotation mark.

How do you open and close quotation marks on a Mac?

Your software may have thought you were beginning a quotation and thus gave you the open single quotation mark. To get a proper apostrophe you may have to use a keyboard command. On the Mac it’s Option + Shift + ] to get the single closed quotation mark (apostrophe). Use Alt + 0146 on the PC.

How do you change quotation marks in Word on a Mac?

From the Tools menu, select AutoCorrect…. In the AutoCorrect window, click the AutoFormat As You Type tab. Make sure “Straight quotation marks” with “smart quotation marks” is selected, and then click OK.

How do you make curly quotes on a Mac?

1. Alt + ] produces an opening single curly quote ( ‘ )
2. Alt + Shift + ] produces a closing single curly quote ( ‘ )
3. Alt + [ produces an opening double curly quote ( “ )
4. Alt + Shift + [ produces a closing double curly quote ( ” )

Do you use quotes when defining a word?

Defining terms: use quotes for the first (defining) use of the term. Note that we don’t want to change the contents of the quoted material, since we’ll use that exact term in the future.

What can I say to encourage a friend?

What to Say to Someone

• You are more fun than anyone or anything I know, including bubble wrap.
• You are the most perfect you there is.
• You are enough.
• You are one of the strongest people I know.
• You look great today.
• You have the best smile.
• Your outlook on life is amazing.
• You just light up the room.

How do you encourage a word to a friend?

Words of Encouragement for a Friend. “When you feel like giving up, remember why you held on for so long in the first place.” “God gave you this life because he knew you were strong enough to live it.” “Stop beating yourself up.

Most of the time, we want text in a Microsoft Word document to automatically wrap, that is, to move to the next line when it is too long to fit on one line. Word wrap is great except when it breaks up text we want to stay together such as dates, names, phone numbers, phrases, formulas, titles or other text that should remain together on the same line. Fortunately, Word has some easy ways to keep text together. To learn these tricks to keep text together in Microsoft Word, continue reading or watch my how-to video:

Some examples of text you might want to keep together and not break up on separate lines:

• September 2, 2019
• Christopher A. Jones, Ph.D.
• (555) 123-4567
• state-of-the-art

Your options for keeping text together in Microsoft Word include:

• Non-breaking spaces
• Non-breaking hyphens
• Non-breaking paragraphs & lines

Non-Breaking Spaces & Non-Breaking Hyphens

The common solution: what most people do to keep text together is move to the beginning of the text and press [Enter] to start a new line. This is fine until any of the text changes and causes breaks in the wrong place. Now you’re wasting time going back to remove these extra lines when you no longer need the forced break to the text. And, this manual approach doesn’t work well if you have paragraph formatting or styles that adds space between paragraphs.

The right solution: keep text together with special characters. Specifically, delete the spaces or hyphens and replace normal spaces and hyphens with non-breaking spaces or non-breaking hyphens:

• Non-breaking space: [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [Spacebar]
• Non-breaking hyphen: [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [Hyphen]

As the name implies, non-breaking characters connect the text together and the entire phrase or group of characters will all automatically move to the next line together but only as needed.

To view non-breaking space and hyphen characters in a document, click Show/Hide in the Paragraph group (Home tab). Word represents non-breaking space characters with a degree symbol (°) and non-breaking hyphen characters with a double‑length hyphen (these are a bit harder to distinguish from regular text).

Non-Breaking Paragraphs and Lines

Next, let’s go one step further. When you don’t want a paragraph or even several lines of text to break between two pages, don’t press multiple [Enter] keys to move text to the next page. Instead, try the following Word techniques to keep text automatically together:

1. Select the paragraph or section of text you want to keep together.
2. On the Home tab in Word, click the Paragraph group’s dialog launcher (the small arrow at the bottom-right of the group).
3. Pick the Line and Page Breaks
4. Check the Keep lines together option, and click OK.
5. If you have multiple paragraphs selected, for instance, a title with following text, also click on Keep with next which will keep the paragraphs together on the same page.

Bonus Word Tricks

To find non-breaking spaces and non-breaking hyphens in your text, use the Find feature as follows:

1. On the Home tab, click the Find icon in the Editing group on the right or press the keyboard shortcut [Ctrl] + F.
2. In the Navigation Pane to the left, enter one of the following: ^s to find non-breaking space; ^

Make sure you have the Show/Hide non-printing characters features turned on so you can see the hidden characters for these non-breaking symbols.

Discover more ways to save time editing and formatting your Word documents at:

By Dawn Bjork, MCT, MOSM, The Software Pro®
Microsoft Certified Trainer, Productivity Speaker, Software Consultant

To indent the first line of a paragraph, put your cursor at the beginning of the paragraph and press the tab key. When you press Enter to start the next paragraph, its first line will be indented.

Tip: If you want to change indentation for paragraphs that have already been written, use the tab-key method on the first paragraph, as described above. Then put your cursor at the beginning of the next paragraph. Press Backspace and then Enter. Repeat the process for subsequent paragraphs.

First-line indent by default

If you always want first-line indentation, modify the Normal style:

Put the cursor anywhere in the paragraph.

On the Home tab, right-click the Normal style, and choose Modify.

Select Format, and then choose Paragraph.

On the Indents and Spacing tab, under Indentation, select First line.

Select OK again.

Note: If you always want first-line indentation whenever you start a new document, choose the New documents based on this template option before you select OK.

I am using MS Word (2010). I have a couple of parts of the document where I have a couple of lines at the top of the page and then the rest of the page is blank and then the writing starts again at the top of the next page.

I can’t delete any of the space between the text. Did I insert a page break or something?

How do I delete the space.

Answers

• Marked as answer by Jaynet Zhang Monday, May 28, 2012 2:04 AM

All replies

• Marked as answer by Jaynet Zhang Monday, May 28, 2012 2:04 AM

If your blank page occurs in the middle of a document (and is not caused by an Odd/Even Page section break), there is a remote chance that it is caused by a plethora of empty paragraphs, but more often it is the result of a manual page break. This is one reason manual page breaks are discouraged: when formatting changes (either because of editing or because the document is opened on a system using a different printer), the manual page break may immediately follow a natural page break, causing a blank page.

Even without displaying nonprinting characters, you should be able to see a manual page break that has been inserted using Ctrl+Enter or Insert | Break: Page break (in Word 2010, access the Breaks gallery from the Page Setup group on the Page Layout tab on the Ribbon). It will be represented by a dotted line across the page labeled “Page Break.” (In Word 2010, the indicator will extend only part of the way across the page.) You can easily select this and delete it.

If you don’t see a manual page break, the likelihood is that the page break is being caused by paragraph formatting. Whenever a page ends short for no apparent reason, examine the paragraph(s) at the top of the following page. Go to the Line and Page breaks tab of Format | Paragraph and see whether “Page break before” or “Keep with next” is checked. Although this type of formatting alone will not result in a blank page, it frequently accounts for a partially empty page and could result in a blank page if the “blank” page contains a single paragraph mark formatted as “Page break before,” followed by another “Page break before” paragraph on the next page. (In Word 2010, access the Paragraph dialog by clicking on the dialog launcher arrow at the bottom right corner of the Paragraph group on the Home tab of the Ribbon.)

Use these two paragraph formats in Word to keep text from breaking across pages and losing its heading text.

To illustrate this behavior, let’s fix the problem in the document shown below. The heading falls just before a page break that pushes some of the following paragraph onto the next page. It isn’t wrong as is, but depending on the paragraph’s purpose (or length), you might want to keep it together.

To keep a paragraph from breaking across two pages, do the following:

1. Right-click the heading.
2. From the resulting context menu, choose Paragraph.
3. Click the Line and Page Break tab.
4. In the Pagination section, check the Keep Lines Together option.
5. Click OK.

Immediately, Word will adjust the break by pulling the text at the bottom of the first page to the beginning of the second. Doing so presents a new problem – the separated heading.

That’s quickly remedied by right-clicking in the heading text and repeating the above steps. This time, select the Keep With Next option. Doing so pushes the header onto the next page – everything’s together!

Now, the truth is, this is a contrived example because usually, you can produce the same results by applying the Keep With Next option to the heading from the get-go. Sometimes, that one step will push the heading and the entire paragraph onto the next page – bypassing the Keep Lines Together option altogether. I forced the issue so you could see the possibility. When applying either option to your work, take the simplest route, unless your conventions force otherwise.

This discussion wouldn’t be complete without mentioning styles. If this problem grows beyond an occasional fix, consider adding the appropriate setting to a style. That way, Word will automatically keep headings with the first line of the following paragraph. You could even go so far as to create a special style for paragraphs that you don’t want to break across pages and specify the Keep Lines Together setting. Using styles would take the guesswork out of the breaks entirely.

As you are creating your documents, there may be certain types of paragraphs that should always begin at the top of a page. For instance, you may have a certain paragraph format that you use for section headings. Your page design calls for all sections to begin at the top of a page, so you must come up with a way to ensure this always happens.

There are two ways you can do this. The first is to search for each section heading and manually insert a page break before each of the heads. This can be time consuming, however. It is much easier to format the paragraph so it always begins on a new page. This is done with these steps:

1. Position the insertion point in the section head paragraph.
2. Make sure the Home of the ribbon is displayed.
3. Click the small icon at the bottom-right of the Paragraph group. Word displays the Paragraph dialog box.
4. Display the Line and Page Breaks tab. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The Line and Page Breaks tab of the Paragraph dialog box.

Using page breaks before your section heads is even more automatic if you use a style for all of the heads. All you need to do is format the style so that the head will always have a page break before it. Then, every time you use that heading style, Word inserts the requisite page break.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (6820) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Office 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Forcing a Page Break Before a Paragraph.

Author Bio

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen.

Можно увеличить или уменьшить интервал между строками текста и изменить расстояние до и после абзаца.

Настройка межстрочного интервала

Выберите один или несколько абзацев либо нажмите текстовый блок или фигуру с текстом, который хотите изменить.

Межстрочный интервал нельзя настроить для текста в ячейке таблицы.

Примечание. Изменения будут применены только к тем абзацам или тексту, которые выбраны. Если в документе используются стили абзацев и Вы хотите включить изменение межстрочного интервала в стиль абзаца, при выделении текста перетяните дальше последнего символа в абзаце, чтобы включить символ форматирования (он невидим, пока Вы его не выделите).

В верхней части боковой панели «Формат» нажмите кнопку «Стиль».

Если текст расположен в текстовом блоке, таблице или фигуре, сначала нажмите вкладку «Текст» в верхней части боковой панели, затем кнопку «Стиль».

Нажмите всплывающее меню справа от пункта «Интервалы» и выберите нужный вариант.

Если это всплывающее меню не отображается, нажмите стрелку раскрытия рядом с пунктом «Интервалы» (чтобы закрыть его).

Использование произвольного межстрочного интервала

Выберите один или несколько абзацев либо нажмите текстовый блок, фигуру или ячейки таблицы с текстом, который хотите изменить.

Примечание. Изменения будут применены только к тем абзацам или тексту, которые выбраны. Если в документе используются стили абзацев и Вы хотите включить изменение межстрочного интервала в стиль абзаца, при выделении текста перетяните дальше последнего символа в абзаце, чтобы включить символ форматирования (он невидим, пока Вы его не выделите).

В верхней части боковой панели «Формат» нажмите кнопку «Стиль».

Если текст расположен в текстовом блоке, таблице или фигуре, сначала нажмите вкладку «Текст» в верхней части боковой панели, затем кнопку «Стиль».

Нажмите стрелку раскрытия рядом с пунктом «Интервалы» (чтобы раскрыть его), нажмите всплывающее меню под пунктом «Интервал», затем выберите один из вариантов.

Строки. Расстояние между надстрочными элементами (частями букв, которые выступают над основной строкой) и подстрочными элементами (частями букв, которые выступают под основной строкой) остается неизменным. Расстояние между строками пропорционально размеру шрифта.

Минимум. Расстояние между строками остается постоянным (но при увеличении размера шрифта строки не перекрываются). Расстояние между строками не может быть меньше заданного значения, но может превышать его, если это необходимо во избежание перекрывания строк текста при увеличении размера шрифта.

Равно. Заданное значение устанавливает точное расстояние между базовыми линиями текста, в результате чего строки могут перекрываться.

Между. Установленное Вами значение увеличивает интервал между линиями вместо того, чтобы увеличивать высоту строк. Для сравнения: двойной интервал увеличивает вдвое высоту каждой строки.

Чтобы задать интервал для выбранного параметра, нажимайте стрелки справа от всплывающего меню.

Настройка интервала между абзацами

Можно настроить ширину интервала перед одним или несколькими абзацами.

Нажмите в нужном Вам абзаце, чтобы поместить в него точку вставки, или перетяните для выбора нескольких абзацев.

В верхней части боковой панели «Формат» нажмите кнопку «Стиль».

Если текст расположен в текстовом блоке, таблице или фигуре, сначала нажмите вкладку «Текст» в верхней части боковой панели, затем кнопку «Стиль».

Нажмите стрелку раскрытия рядом с пунктом «Интервалы», затем нажимайте стрелки рядом с пунктами «Перед абзацем» и «После абзаца».