How To Delete a Page in Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is an exceptionally powerful and popular productivity program. From jotting notes to drafting communications, powering through reports, and more, Word can be used to accomplish any number of daily tasks.

If you need to delete a page in Microsoft Word, this tutorial is for you. While Microsoft Word is an incredibly powerful word processor and has a feature for almost anything, there is no quick way to delete a page.

Instead, we have to very carefully cut, copy, and paste, taking care to make sure the copy fits where it’s intended. Sure, it’s still easier than the typewriter days of yore, but it’s also very easy to accidentally remove the wrong thing.

If you’re struggling to delete a page, let’s take a look at a very simple way to do it.

How to Delete a Page in Microsoft Word on a PC or Mac

Word makes it more difficult than you’d expect to delete a single page.

There are a couple of methods you can use to delete a page from Word. For this tutorial, we’ll be using Word 2016; however, the steps should be more or less the same for any version.

With that in mind, here are the steps to delete a page in Word:

1. Select an empty space on a page.
   
2. Select the Home tab and select Find.
   
3. Select Go To (you can skip steps 1-3 by pressing Ctrl + G for Windows or Option + CMD + G for Mac).
   
4. Type the page number in the text box and click Go To.
   
5. Type page and click Go To. This will highlight the entire page. Select Close to exit the dialog box.
   
6. Hit Backspace or Delete.
   

Your extra page should now disappear. Double-check that the Backspace didn’t inadvertently delete a character from the document and then save the change.

Other Ways to Delete a Page in Word

As mentioned earlier, there are a few other methods you can try to see which feels right for you and your editing style.

First, you can also use the Navigation pane. Follow these steps to do so:

1. Navigate to View and check the Print Layout option located on the far left side.
2. Open the Navigation Pane tab, then choose the Pages tab
3. Scroll down to find the page you wish to delete.
4. Double click on that page to bring it up.
5. If the page appears to be blank, press Ctrl + Shift + 8 (CMD + 8 on Mac) to see the paragraph marks.  This can help you determine if there are any unintended entries on the page.
6. Hitting Delete until the page disappears will fix these errors.

This method is very useful for blank pages that seem to show up out of nowhere, or even for longer portions of text that you want to spot check before you delete.

This method is useful if a page just won’t delete using Backspace or any of these other methods. If you see several paragraph breaks on the blank page, that is likely why it won’t delete. Remove the breaks and remove the page.

You can achieve the same results with a Shift + click process:

1. Place the cursor at the beginning of the page you want to delete.
2. Hold down Shift and place the cursor at the end of the page you want to delete. The text should now all be highlighted.
3. Select Delete and then Backspace to delete the page.

Finally, if you want to delete a page at the end of a document but Word won’t let you, there is a way around it. Word adds a permanent paragraph break at the end of a document that just won’t go away. Depending on your layout, this can create an empty page at the end that you cannot delete.

1. Press Ctrl + Shift + 8 to show paragraph breaks.
2. Select the final paragraph break.
3. Shrink the font size to 1.

This should remove that final blank page from your document and fit that final break onto your last page.

How to Delete a Page in Word on Android

Even though the process for deleting a page in Microsoft Word is almost identical for the desktop app and mobile app, but let’s go over it.

1. Open up the document in Word that you want to edit.
2. Then, click anywhere on the page and type Ctrl + G to open the Find and Replace window.
3. Then, type the page number you want to delete into the Enter page number box, press Enter, and then tap on Close..
4. Make sure that the page you want deleted is highlighted and then tap the Del or Backspace keys.

Final Thoughts

Microsoft Word is a great productivity tool and offers several great features to help us get our work done as quickly as possible. However, as great as it is, Word isn’t without its faults, and the inability to quickly delete a page is one of them.

Fortunately, by using any of the methods  mentioned in this article, you can delete a page in Word without too much trouble, allowing you to get on with your work as quickly as possible.