How to Remove a Page Break in Google Docs

When you’re writing in Google Docs, sometimes an extra page appears, and you need to delete it. This can usually be done by simply deleting the text on the page and using an extra backspace or delete, but this doesn’t always work. In this case, a page break likely exists, and knowing how to delete it will save you a lot of time, effort, and frustration in the future.

Today, I’m going to show you how to remove a page break in Google Docs, so your documents are more professional and ready to be shared.

What’s a Page Break?

A page break controls where content on one page ends and another page begins. Instead of using a bunch of Enters, a page break is inserted to make sure new content starts on a new page, or to move existing content to a new page for a new section.

Page breaks are commonly used while formatting documents, such as manuscripts, books (chapters), and manuals (new sections).

How Page Breaks Are Created

Page breaks are a useful part of content creation. Sometimes, a section needs to go on a new page, and using a page break is the way to ensure that happens while keeping proper formatting as documents grow. If you use a lot of Enters to move something to a new page, the document will look wrong if you add more content above.

Page breaks are commonly used in longer documents. They’re rarely if ever used when drafting a document like a blog post in Google Docs, but I’ve seen them used to create a page at the end with feedback.

Creating a page break in Google Docs happens in one of two ways:

  1. Using CMD+Return on Mac (CTRL+Enter on Windows) where you want the break to happen
  2. Using Insert → Break → Page Break from the menu.

Here’s where you can find Page Break under the Insert menu:

How to Find Page Breaks

There are two ways to find a page break in a Google Doc:

  1. Scroll through the document to find where content ends before the end of a page, and content begins at the top of the next page.
  2. Use View → “Show non-printing characters” to see where a page break has been used.

Here’s how a page break looks in Google Docs (page content courtesy of our favorite text generator, Bacon Ipsum):

The content on the first page ends and leaves white space below it before the end of the page. The next set of content starts at the top of the second page.

With “Show non-printing characters” enabled via the View menu, we see this:

This feature shows Page Breaks, paragraph breaks, and more.

How to Delete a Page Break in Google Docs

Sometimes, we need to delete a page break. Maybe you created one to set content that needed to be reviewed apart, and now it needs to be brought back into the main article. Or maybe you created a page break because of how the document was formatted, but the content was added above it, and now the page break is unnecessary.

Whatever your reason for deleting it, doing so is easy.

Put the cursor where you want to delete the page break and hit backspace/delete.

Here is an example without Non-printing characters showing:

And with Non-printing characters showing:

Once you hit Backspace/Delete, the text from the page below should come onto the current page. There may be an extra line break, depending on if the Page Break was created at the end of the last line or text or on the line below, so you may need to hit backspace/Delete one more time, like in this case:

With one more Delete, the bottom paragraph is now where it belongs:

Creating A Lot of Documents in Google Docs?

If you’re creating a lot of documents in Google Docs, chances are that you need help reviewing/editing them before they’re ready to publish or distribute.

That’s exactly what EditorNinja does. Our team of trained editors reviews hundreds of documents for clients each month. We’d love to discuss doing it for you too.

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