How To Delete Extra Pages In Mac Pages

Often users of Mac Pages, or any word processor, find they have extra blank pages at the end of their document. These can be there for a number of reasons, but they are easy to remove if you know the cause.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to Delete extra blank pages at the end of your Pages document.
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Now a common question I often hear is how do you get rid of blank pages at the end of your Pages document. You've got say a seven page document and there's an eighth page and it's just blank. You don't want that page to appear when you export as a PDF or when you print a document. Well, there are a few different reasons that you may see extra pages at the end of your Pages document. To get to the bottom of it the first thing you need to understand is that there are two different types of Page's documents. There's a word processing document and a page layout document.  When you create a new document in Pages you start off with a word processing document. If you go to File you'll look down here and you'll see Convert to Page Layout. That means you currently have a word processing document. If it says Convert to Word Processing then you've already converted to a page layout document and this lets you convert back. The main difference is the word processing document includes a default text box on every page that automatically expands as you add more text. This is called the Body Text. So you have this big block in the middle of every page and it just links from one page to the next. It just works like a normal word processor would. Whereas Page Layout documents are completely blank. The pages have nothing on them. If you want to put text on them you actually have to create a text box to hold the text. So you would use a Page Layout document to do things like newsletters, flyers, brochures, certificates. Anything that requires design as opposed to word processing which is when you have text that flows from one page to the next. 
So here's an example of a word processing document. You could see here I've got, under View, page thumbnails turned on and I can see there are three page thumbnails here. The first page, the second page, and the third page which appears to be blank. This is where the frustration comes in. You don't want this blank page. This is supposed to be a two page document. It should end there. So why is there a third page and how can you get rid of it? So to better understand what's going on the first thing I would do is go to View and then turn on Show Layout. This will show you all of the layout elements including the Headers and Footers, and you could see a rectangle around the body text. So you could see each page includes this big rectangle with body text and the Headers and Footers. So when I go to the last page here you can see the big blank body text. Now if I were to continue typing here and add some more text, let me just copy and paste this text again, you could see it automatically flows to the next page. But something has gone wrong here and there's nothing here on the last page. So why is there another page? It should just end right here. 
So the next thing I want you to do is go to View and then Show Invisibles. This will show you invisible characters like line breaks. You see here the space is represented as dots and you have these little paragraph marks representing the line break. But there's still nothing on the third page. So why is it there? Well, the line break here at the end of the second page forces another line. So there actually is something here. There's the beginning of a new line. If I click here you see the cursor blinks there. It's waiting for me to type some more text right there. That's why the page is there. To get rid of this page in this situation all you need to do is get rid of this last line break. You could do that by placing your cursor here at the end and an easy way to always get to the very end is Command A for select all and right arrow to go to the end of the selection. Now with one press on the Delete key on my keyboard I delete that line break. You could see it's gone from there. That gets rid of the last page. There's simply no more text, there's nothing going on here, there's simply no line break to force another page. If I hit Return you could see it adds that line break back in. I get the extra page there ready for me to type new text on it. So that takes care of most cases. Just get rid of the line break. 
In some cases I notice people have lots of line breaks at the end. It's natural to kind of add an extra line break and then maybe go back and edit and then go back to the end again and add another line break by accident. So you end up with something like this when you Show Invisibles. In this case you would do Command A, right arrow to make sure you're at the end, and delete all of these line breaks until you get to the end of that last paragraph eliminating that extra page. 
Now a typical time when this happens is when say you're not even close to the end of the page, you have a bunch of extra lines and you don't realize it. Then you bring in an image. So let's drag and drop an image in here and shrink it down a bit and place it where I want. Maybe it's even no where near the bottom of that page. Maybe it's even on the page before. Like let's put it right up here in this page. Now what's happened is it has pushed the bottom of the text and you have these extra line breaks here which now carry onto the next page. So one minute everything looks fine. You insert an image on the first page and all of a sudden you have an extra third page. So this could be really confusing but all you need to do is Command A, right arrow, then delete these extra spaces, line breaks, until you are back to the number of pages you want. Then for good measure just make sure you don't have any extra line breaks at the end. There's no need for them. They don't add anything to your document and they could potentially add another extra page and maybe you don't even notice it before you go to print or save as PDF and distribute it.
Now another way to get an extra page, of course, is when you insert a Page Break. You can do that with Insert Page Break. It's also Command and the Enter Key which is only on numeric keyboards. But you can use Command Return with the fn key held down to do the same thing. You may have inserted one of these by accident and you could see here that's what a Page Break looks like. That will force everything to a new page even if there's nothing there yet if it's just the beginning of a blank line. So I can add another one of these and you can see it's adding a new page each time. So, you can get rid of these the same way as before. Command A, right arrow, and then you can delete to delete each page break character. Also section breaks will do the same thing. You can see how with invisibles turned off you really can't tell what's going on. Why there's this new page here. But going to the end and deleting will get rid of the character whether it's an extra line break, a page break, or a section break. 
Also page breaks will confuse people because if you insert one here it forces the new page. So you end up with all this blank space at the end. It looks like there's nothing special there. Why does this paragraph go to this next one on the next line but this paragraph jumps all the way to the beginning of the next page. You only can see the truth if you Show Invisibles and see that this is, in fact, a page break here not a new line character. So I can just go to the beginning of this next paragraph and delete, delete, until I get all the way back here and you could see now I've combined the paragraphs. So I'm going to do Return to add a break between these paragraphs and get everything back to the way I want it.
That's not the only situation where you get extra pages. For instance, here I've got a document and on this first page I've got some text and then I've got nothing on the second page. So what's going on here. Well, in this case this text is actually a text box. If I click to select it you can see this is a movable text box. This is not the body text. You could see the body text there is the gray box. I've added a text box on top of that. Here's a similar situation. I've just put a large image on the first page. Even though there's no text there's this blank second page. So what's going on here? Well with either the text box or the image or it could be a shape as well, this element is actually taking up all of the space here and is forcing the first line, which has no text on it at all, to go to the second page. So even if there's no text in the body text of the document it needs a place to start. Since there's no room to start on the first page it will then move  to the second page and that's where you can start typing. If this image was smaller you could see you could start typing here on that same first page. So there is no need for a second page. It's only when the image takes up so much space that it actually pushes the start of the body text to the second page that you get this blank page. 
Now you can solve this a few ways. If you want to keep it as a word processing document you can select this, go to Format, Arrange, and then turn Off text wrap. Now the text will actually be underneath the image. So your blank line is underneath there and there's no need for a second page. Or, since you don't need the body text in this case you could go to File, Convert to Page Layout, and now converted to page layout the body text is gone. So you no longer need that second page for the body text. However, you still have a second page there because now you're in Page Layout mode. So when you're in Page Layout Mode it's a lot easier to get rid of extra blank pages because you have full control over each page. Each page is like a different canvas that you could put text boxes and images and shapes and different things on them. So in your thumbnails here you can select a page and you could simply delete it. You can Control click on it, right click on the mouse, two-finger click on the trackpad, and select Delete or simply by selecting it you can use the Delete key to delete that page. So Page Layout Mode, if you've got an extra page it maybe because you inserted a new page, maybe you planned to use it at one point, maybe you inserted a new page and forgot about it and inserted it another page, filled this with something, and now the third page is extra. All you need to do in Page Layout Mode is select any page that you want to delete, whether it has something on it or it is blank, hit the Delete key and now you've got rid of that extra page. So Page Layout Mode gives you full control over these extra pages. Most of the time when people have problems it's in word processing mode.
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 3 Responses to “How To Delete Extra Pages In Mac Pages”

nick

2 years ago

hey Gary, I'm sure there's a good reason why this is not so, but do you think it would be helpful to make the invisible symbols selectable so you can actually select a bunch of page breaks and delete them?

Gary Rosenzweig

nick: You can select them. For instance, just click before them, then hold Shift and click after them. This selects all of the characters in-between just like any characters. You can also place your text cursor before or after and use Shift+arrows to select them.

William K Kay

Thanks. I learn something new every time.

Comments Closed.

How To Delete Extra Pages In Mac Pages

Comments: 3 Responses to “How To Delete Extra Pages In Mac Pages”

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