How to Add or Delete a Page in Microsoft Word

Most times you pour your writing on the page in Microsoft Word, the software organizes your writing to avoid pesky typographical pitfalls such as widows, where too few of your words spill onto a new line or page. When you have occasion to force page breaks, though, you have to wrestle with the software a bit to get it to comply. Word has several built-in measures to give you control over adding and deleting pages to ensure your document has the exact flow you require.

One of the quickest and most common ways to add a page in Word doesn't have anything to do with Word's ribbons, tabs, buttons or menus – you simply use a keyboard shortcut. Click the cursor where you want to add a page and press "Ctrl-Enter." To delete a page, press "Ctrl-Backspace." You may have to press "Ctrl-Backspace" multiple times if there are items on the page you are trying to delete.

You can delete a page very easily using the "Navigation Pane" in Word. Go to "View," then on the ribbon above "Show," click the check-box next to "Navigation Pane." On Office 2007, this is called "Document Map" and under "Show/Hide." After doing this, at the top of the panel on the left, click the drop-down box that says "Document Map" and change it to "Thumbnails."

From this point you can highlight the page on the left hand side, then press "Delete" to remove it. This is a good option to use if you can't delete a blank page in Word.

Word may seem to have all the control as it flows lines from one page to the next automatically, but the "Breaks" menu contains several ways for you to force Word to add a page within your document. Click the "Layout" tab and click the "Breaks" menu in the Page Setup section of the ribbon.

Make sure to have your cursor where you want to add a page and click the first option in the menu, "Page." This immediately inserts a page. For more control, use the "Next Page," "Even Page" and "Odd Page" add options from this menu. These can be helpful when you're under layout constraints such as with magazines, where you have to break on certain pages in a book-like format.

A tried and true method of adding or deleting a page in Word comes from the old-school style of simply highlighting text. Highlight an entire page's text and press the "Delete" key. Word will automatically move up the contents of all the other pages in the document.

You can also add a page this way by highlighting text from another document, clicking the cursor where the new text should go, and pressing the "Ctrl-V" keys to paste it in. Depending on the software program and format of the text you copied from, you may need to adjust the newly added page's style to match your current one.

Adding and deleting pages disrupts the integrity of your original document. It's always a good idea to plan to re-scan your pages, looking out for changes to text, paragraph and image flow. If you inserted a table of contents through the "References" tab, be sure to right-click and select "Update Table" to update your page numbers. If you manually entered page numbers, you'll need to check them to ensure they stay accurate.