Forcing a Final Blank Page

Jan prepares multiple documents for her company's Board meetings. They are sent electronically, and she has to print a few copies. Jan wonders if there is any way to have Word automatically insert a blank page at the end of a document so that the next document doesn't start printing on the "back side" of the previous document.

If you are printing files individually, there should be no problem—your printer should take care of finishing each print job individually. This means that it should take care of making sure that the last page of a document prints properly, on its own piece of paper. If you have a bunch of documents to print, see the tip Printing Documents in a Folder for a way to print them quickly, yet individually.

The only time that the paging would not occur correctly is if you are combining the files before printing. Either you are combining multiple Word documents into a single Word document, or you are combining multiple documents into a single PDF document.

If you are combining multiple Word documents into a single Word document, the answer is to follow these general steps for combining:

1. Press Ctrl+End to jump to the end of the document.
2. Add the new document to the current document.
3. Press Ctrl+End to jump to the end of the document you just added.
4. Press Enter once or twice.
5. Press the Up Arrow to get back to the end of the document you added.
6. Insert a section break, making sure the new section will start on an odd page. (See the tip Starting a New Section on an Odd Page Number.)

Repeat these steps as many times as necessary to combine all your documents. You can then print the now-single document that contains all of the previously individual documents, and the paging should come out as you would prefer. The same is true if you are making a PDF from the combined documents—there should now be blank pages automatically, as necessary, for the paging to work properly.

Another way to handle this is to simply make sure that all of your Word documents have an even number of pages before combining them. (This works well if you do batch conversion of the documents to a PDF format, outside of Word.) You can find information on how to make sure each document has an even number of pages in this tip:

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13651) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021.