I'm working with Word 365 (2013?) on a Windows 8 machine. I've inherited a document I need to finish and reformat. I've created my own styles and deleted most or all of the styles that are not my own. The problem I'm having is, when I add a page break at the end of a chapter it creates a large blank area at the top of that page (prior to the page break)... the paragraph at the bottom of the previous page is the same style as the paragraph that is being pushed below the large blank area and it has no "before spacing" (it's set to 0) in the style. I've tried "Keep with next, Keep lines together, Page break before, Suppress line numbers" in the options and none have fixed the issue. If I turn on "reveal codes" nothing shows up that I can delete. And I'm using no "tables" just text. I have setup a header, but it looks correct and it's "position from top" and "position from bottom" are minimal. Any help would be appreciated.

Any chance your last page is set for vertical center layout? On pages filled with text this doesn't show much, but with only a little text it is dramatic.

This is a section property.
Sections / Headers and Footers in Microsoft Word 2007-2013
It is controlled in the following layout dialog which you reach on the Page Layout tab in the Page Setup Group (dialog launcher in bottom right).

Attached Images

00 deleteme.png (22.7 KB, 20 views)

You're a monster, that seems to be the issue... wow, maybe I would have eventually found that, but who would think one would set up a page for center alignment for a novel format, as I said, I inherited the doc... thanks for jogging the think box. Also, I wouldn't have gone there because it isn't appearing on every page, only pages with a page break at the bottom. Brilliant.

Glad to have helped. After you've bumped into it a time or to, you learn to duck.