Word to PDFBlank Pages After Converting Word to PDF: Causes and Fixes
The blank page is almost always already in your Word document — the export just makes it impossible to ignore. Four things cause it: an empty paragraph Word will not let you delete (usually after a table), a page break or section break parked at the end of the document, an Even Page or Odd Page section break that inserts a filler page by design, and a paragraph or table row set to start on a fresh page. Turn on formatting marks and all four become visible in about thirty seconds.
Turn on formatting marks first
Press Ctrl+Shift+8 in Word for Windows, or Cmd+8 in Word for Mac. You can also click the ¶ button in the Paragraph group on the Home tab. Nothing you see after this prints or exports — it is Word showing you its own scaffolding.
Three things become visible, and one of them is your blank page:
- A ¶ mark for every paragraph, including empty ones
- A dotted line labeled Page Break where someone pressed Ctrl+Enter
- A double dotted line labeled Section Break (Next Page), (Continuous), (Even Page) or (Odd Page)
Scroll to the blank page in your document. Whatever sits on it, or immediately before it, is the cause. The reason Backspace has not worked so far is that Word protects two paragraph marks it considers structural: the one that follows every table, and the very last one in the document. Both refuse to be deleted, and both can push a page into your PDF.
Cause 1: the empty paragraph after a table
Word requires a paragraph after every table — a table can never be the last thing in a document. When a table ends near the bottom of a page, that mandatory ¶ has nowhere to go and lands on the next page. On screen it looks like nothing. In the PDF it is a full blank page.
You cannot delete it, so shrink it instead. Click just to the left of that ¶ to select it, click into the Font Size box on the Home tab, type 1, and press Enter. In most documents the page disappears immediately.
If it does not, the paragraph's spacing is still holding it open. With the ¶ still selected, open the Paragraph dialog (the small arrow at the bottom right of the Home tab's Paragraph group), set Spacing Before and After to 0, and set Line spacing to Exactly at 1 pt.
There is a second method: select the ¶, open the Font dialog (the small arrow in the Home tab's Font group), tick Hidden, and click OK. Hidden text does not print or export. The catch is that Word has a display setting that prints hidden text, so a colleague with that option enabled will see the blank page come back. The 1-point method survives everyone's settings, so prefer it.
The same trick works on the document's final paragraph mark when the blank page is at the very end and there is no table involved.
Causes 2 and 3: page breaks and section breaks
With marks on, a manual page break is a dotted line reading Page Break. Click immediately before it and press Delete. That is the whole fix. These accumulate at the end of documents that have been edited by several people — someone deletes a final appendix but leaves the break that preceded it.
Section breaks need more care. Deleting one merges two sections, and the text above the break inherits the page setup of the section below it. If the break separates a landscape page, different margins, or a different header, deleting it will change the pages before it. Check what the following section looks like before you press Delete.
Even Page and Odd Page breaks are the one case where the blank page genuinely is not visible in Word. These breaks exist so a new chapter always starts on a right-hand or left-hand page, and Word inserts a filler page when the count does not work out. It does not draw that filler page in the editing view — it appears only in File > Print preview and in the exported PDF. You cannot click it or select it, so there is nothing to delete.
Change the break type instead. Click anywhere inside the section that follows the break, open Page Setup (the small arrow in the Page Setup group on the Layout tab), go to the Layout tab, and change Section start from Even Page or Odd Page to New page. The filler page goes away and the section still begins on a fresh page.
Cause 4: a paragraph or row set to start on a new page
If the blank page shows no break line and no stray ¶, the cause is on the page after it. Click into the first paragraph following the blank page, open the Paragraph dialog, and go to the Line and Page Breaks tab.
Page break before ticked does exactly what a manual page break does, but leaves no visible mark. It is commonly baked into a Heading 1 style, which is why every chapter title in some documents drags a blank page along with it. Untick it for that paragraph, or modify the style if you want the change everywhere.
Keep with next on a run of paragraphs forces the whole run onto one page. Applied to a long block, it can shunt several inches of content forward and leave the previous page nearly empty — which reads as blank in a PDF even though it is not.
Tables have their own version. Select the row that starts the page after the gap, right-click, choose Table Properties, and open the Row tab. If Allow row to break across pages is unchecked and the row is taller than the space remaining, the entire row jumps to the next page. Tick it, or shorten the row's contents.
Finding the blank page fast in a long document
In a 4-page document you just scroll. In a 90-page one, use thumbnails. In Word for Windows press Ctrl+F or turn on Navigation Pane on the View tab, then click the Pages tab. In Word for Mac go to View > Sidebar > Navigation Pane and choose Thumbnails. Empty pages are unmistakable at thumbnail size.
To jump straight to a page number, press Ctrl+G (Option+Cmd+G on a Mac), choose Page, type the number, click Go To, then Close. Your cursor lands at the top of that page with formatting marks still showing.
One caveat: when Even Page or Odd Page breaks are involved, the PDF page numbers and Word's page numbers drift apart, because Word's count excludes the filler pages. Navigate by what is on the page — a heading, the last line of a table — rather than by number.
The converter is not the cause
It is a reasonable suspicion, and it is almost always wrong. A faithful converter reproduces the document's own pagination, and every mainstream route reads the same breaks and the same paragraph marks: Word's File > Save As with PDF selected, macOS File > Print > PDF > Save as PDF, Google Docs File > Download > PDF Document, and the browser converter on this site's homepage. Switching tools moves the blank page from one PDF to another.
There is one genuine exception, and it looks different. A converter that miscalculates line heights can invent a page break that is not in the document — but when that happens, the blank page is never the only symptom. Text will have reflowed, a table will split in an unfamiliar place, headings will sit differently. If your PDF differs from Word in more than just the blank page, you are looking at a rendering problem rather than a document problem, and layout shifts during conversion covers that case.
A quick check after you convert
Open the finished PDF and compare its page count with Word's. If the numbers match and no thumbnail is empty, you are done.
If a blank page survives all four checks, use File > Print in Word and read the preview. Print preview renders the document exactly as it will export, filler pages included, so it is the fastest way to confirm what is really there. A blank page in the print preview is in the document, and one of the four causes above is still hiding in it. A blank page that appears in the PDF but not in the print preview is the rare converter fault — export again with Word's own Save As and compare.
Fix the .docx rather than deleting the page from the PDF. A PDF-side deletion lasts until the next person exports the file, and then it is back. If you do not have Word to edit with, converting without Microsoft Word covers the alternatives — LibreOffice Writer shows the same formatting marks from its View menu and can make every fix described here.