The PDF from Word has blank pages

Word regularly exports pages you never saw on screen. A stray empty paragraph, a
page break, or a table that reaches the bottom of a page will each turn into a
blank page in the PDF, sometimes right in the middle of the document.

Fix it in Word once and every export after that comes out clean.

Find what is causing it

1. Open the document in Word.
2. Turn on formatting marks. Press Ctrl+Shift+8 on Windows, or Command+8
   on a Mac. You can also click the small paragraph symbol on the Home tab.
   Nothing about your document changes. You are only seeing marks that were
   always there.
3. Scroll to the blank page. You will almost always find one of three things: a
   lone paragraph mark sitting on its own, a line reading Page Break, or a
   table on the page before that runs right to the bottom.

Fix it

1. A lone paragraph mark. Click just after it and press Backspace until it
   is gone.
2. A page break. Put your cursor at the start of the Page Break line and
   press Delete.
3. A table that reaches the bottom of the page. Word insists on one empty
   paragraph after every table, and when the table fills the page that paragraph
   gets pushed onto a page of its own. You cannot delete it. Shrink it instead:
   select that paragraph mark, click into the font size box, type 01, and
   press Enter. The paragraph is still there, now far too small to need its own
   page.

Press Ctrl+Shift+8 (or Command+8) again to hide the marks, then save as PDF.

If that paragraph still will not fit, give it a little more room. Go to
Layout, Margins, Custom Margins, and set the bottom margin to 0.3 inches.

If you cannot change the Word file

Sometimes the PDF came from somebody else and you simply need the blank pages
gone.

On a Mac, open the PDF, choose File then Duplicate so you are working on a
copy, then View and Thumbnails to show the pages down the left. Click a blank
page and press Delete. Save when you are done.

On Windows there is no built-in way to remove pages from a PDF. Send us the
file and we will send it back cleaned up.