Thank you, Charles, but it's not pasted text. I'm not sure what you mean by "Last line does not have a paragraph mark but a line break." It's a plain and simple complete paragraph, at the end of which I inserted a column break.



And thank you, too, Paul. I am quite certain that the column break is properly inserted at the end of the complete paragraph. I've repeated the entire process several times with the same result. So then I tried text wrapping and the result was even uglier--it forced the last line of the paragraph over to the top of the RH column.
I don't know if this bears on the situation, but the end of the paragraph where I want to insert the column break ends with a footnote. I tried deleting the footnote, but the end result was exactly the same. And I get the same results I'm reporting on two machines, one with Windows 7 and the other with Windows 365.

As indicated in my previous reply, the column break has to be inserted after the paragraph break, not "at the end of the complete paragraph".

If inserting a wrapped picture "forced the last line of the paragraph over to the top of the RH column", all that indicates is that you inserted it such that it was anchored to that paragraph instead of being anchored elsewhere.

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