Printing Just the Envelope

Tom routinely sets up a document to print an envelope. There is no letter or anything else to go with the envelope; he just needs to print the envelope each month. Word is inserting a blank page below the envelope that Tom cannot figure out how to delete or keep from printing. Telling the printer to only print a specific page didn't work. He wonders how to delete that blank page or keep it from printing?

Let's look at both things that Tom wants to do, starting first with keeping the blank page from printing. The easiest way to do this is to remember that you can specify, in the Print settings, exactly what you want to print. Tom, it seems, is trying to tell Word to print the first page, however Word doesn't consider Tom's document to have two pages. Instead, the document contains two sections, each one page long. So, if you print "page 1" you end up with both the envelope and blank page printed because they are both page 1.

Instead, print just the envelope in this manner:

1. Press Ctrl+P. If you are using Word 2007 you'll see the Print dialog box. If you're using Word 2010 or a later version, you'll see the printing options in the File tab of the ribbon. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Print options.

2. In the Pages box, enter "s1" (without the quote marks). This indicates you want to print only the first section of the document.
3. Click on OK.

Now, let's take a look at how you can actually delete that blank page. The key to doing this is to remember that when you first added the envelope to the document, Word added it as a new section at the beginning of the document. That means there is a section break (as already discussed) between the envelope and the blank page that follows the envelope. In order to see this section break, you need to display the Home tab of the ribbon and click the Show/Hide tool. (This looks like a backwards P character and is in the Paragraph group of the ribbon.)

Once you see the section break, it is an easy matter to select it and delete it. The problem, though, is that doing so will get rid of the page formatting necessary for the envelope. What you are then left with is the page formatting for the document, and you effectively have deleted the envelope.

To get around this, follow these steps:

1. Press Ctrl+Home to move the insertion point to the beginning of the envelope.
2. Display the Layout tab of the ribbon.
3. Click the small icon at the bottom-right of the Page Setup group of the ribbon. Word displays the Page Setup dialog box.
4. Without changing anything in the dialog box, click on OK.
5. If Word displays a message box that suggests changing margins, click the Ignore button.
6. Press Ctrl+End to move the insertion point to the end of the document.
7. Press F4. Word applies whatever page settings were in the dialog box (steps 3-4) to the second section in your document (the blank page).
8. Delete the section break between the envelope and the blank page.

Now you can save your envelope and it will be just the envelope—no trailing blank page.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13028) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Word in Microsoft 365.