Hi!

First, I am not an experienced Word user, so the answer may be obvious and I simply don't see it, but I am working on a document that is a mixed bag of old and new versions of Word. On the several pages there appears, when I select the paragraph dropdown menu, hundreds of hidden (appear grey in the Preview window) "Paragraph" one after another, that force some [now] unwanted spacing—huge chunks. I can't seem to find the way to remove this white space. Any tips on this? And also, I'd like to find a way of removing the old mixed up versions in the doc and streamline it to Word 2016 that we're using in the office now.

Thanks so much in advance for any assistance.

Do these hidden paragraphs print (take up space when you print)?

Old and new versions of Word? Which versions? How Word sets up pages and formats text has not changed much in 20 years.

Are these grey areas headers or footers? What happens if you double-click in one? Does a header or footer editing area open?

They do indeed take up space when printed. I was told that the doc has mixed versions. There is a header and footer consistent through the doc, but these are neither, though in the Preview window I see the header series of grey "Paragraph..." looks the same as those in the body of the misc pages. In fact, now that I look at it, it appears to be that the formatting is selecting to skip to subsequent pages when a new section of paragraphs take up more space than is available on a page.

Word versions. There are essentially two types of Word documents. Those from the menu versions (Word 2003 and earlier) and those from the Ribbon versions (Word 2007 and later). The second type is considered more secure and stable.

I cannot figure out your problem without actually seeing a document. You can attach a sample with such paragraph marks to this forum. To do that, click on the Go Advanced button at the bottom of the message window. Click on the paperclip icon to attach a file. You can take out any proprietary or confidential information before you do this.

Thank you Charles. It's not a doc I can make public, alas. And I tried to change text and it messes everything up. I'll keep trying to research this issue. Otherwise I'll remove all formatting and rebuild the 40 pages.

To clean up your document, the first couple of steps are:
1. Make sure you are not tracking revisions
2. Remove any section breaks. I do this with a find and replace but you can do it manually if you wish.
The grey areas you talk about are most likely headers or footers so step 2 may have solved that problem. If the grey returns remain then they could be simply formatted with a colour. You can remove empty paragraphs by find/replacing ^p^p with ^p but you will need to do this multiple times if there are large blocks of empty paragraphs since you are halving the count each time with that replacement.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Or you can use a single wildcard Find/Replace, where:
Find = [^13]{2,}
Replace = ^p

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

No luck at all in the suggestions, though thanks all the same Guessed and macropod.


Also, am including some screen shots of draft mode view and document map side by side. (Strange that some of the numbers/letters of sub paragraphs are missing. And I'm not sure if the lines/dots along the left sides of the views help explain the strangeness.)

Thanks again in advance for your consideration.

Pawl

If you mean the white space at the bottom of the first page, for example, that has nothing to do with empty paragraphs or anything of the kind. Rather, it's a consequence of your use of 'keep with next' and 'keep together' paragraph settings. I suggest you remove those for the entire document and only apply them where you need to keep content together at an automatic page break - or insert manual page breaks beforehand.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Hurrah!!! It's solved, thanks to you Paul Epstein. Here's why it remained so elusive to me. When I went into the paragraph settings these items were unchecked. What I failed to understand was that they were unchecked when nothing was selected. When I hit the CtrlA and then checked the paragraph settings, there were solid, so when I checked each box twice (first time changed to a check mark, then empty), I found the doc as I wanted it.

In retrospect, most people who have taken the time to take a tutorial on Word would know that the settings window does not indicate the entire doc, but just the point where the cursor lies—I think I have that correct. But I tend to jump into things and tutor myself, with help from experts. Lazy way, maybe, but I then tend to pay the price in stalls and detours.

Lesson(s) learned. Thanks again!

Pawl

I'll add this reference just for anyone who finds the same thread when struggling or confused …

http://word.mvps.org/faqs/formatting/NonPrintChars.htm

Grateful for the reference.