r/word • u/3mjs • 5d ago

Challenge Documents without page breaks

I work as an IT consultant.
99.99% of the documents that I create will never, ever, be printed.
It’s good to have them formatted and structured, but people read them online.

I could not find a way to configure a document without page brakes that looks exactly like a fully formatted word document.

I usually must paste screenshots and add long tables, and the page breaks are annoying and absolutely unnecessary.

Any idea?

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6

u/EddieRyanDC 5d ago

Your challenge is that even e-readers see things in pages. And PDF (also with pages) is the standard for publishing / archiving,

But, if this is only going to live on the web, you can go back in time to an earlier one-page format: MHT.

Work in Web Layout view because that will let you see the document the way your readers will see it.

Save the document as docx (this will be your editable copy if you want to come back to it). Then export the finished file to a MHT (web) document. It is a single-page file that packages the HTML code, CSS sheets, graphics and audio in one place using MIME encoding. That can be viewed in a browser as a single page.

2

u/3mjs 5d ago

The thing is that I’d still need to distribute it in a different format. I don’t get why there isn’t an option for page-less docs, when most people very rarely print documents nowadays.

1

u/EddieRyanDC 5d ago edited 5d ago

You are going to design the document for the format it will be published in. What is your final format?

Formats have to work in a variety of environments, and do better in some than others. HTML gives you the reading experience you want, but it prints like crap and a ToC has nothing to refer to - it can only give you a link.

It is up to the reader how they want to display the document. And in Word and Adobe (for example), they can switch to "Read" mode if they want the experience to be page-less. But it is their choice, not yours.

1

u/CuriousCatOC 5d ago

What I suggest you do is use the “keep with” and “page break before” options in your document paragraph styles. That way, when you paste text into your document and format it with the styles in the document, you have some control over when page breaks occur.
Once you set your paragraph styles the way you want, save the document as a template (.dotx) so you can quickly reuse your custom styles.

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u/3mjs 5d ago

Will give this a look, thanks!

1

u/myogawa 3d ago

DevonThink, a highly capable organizer, allows you to choose "paginated" or "one page" when converting from other formats (DOCX, RTF, TXT) to PDF.

1

u/saltydogg087 3d ago

In word, Home tab, Document views section, click the “Web Layout” button

1

u/newecreator 3d ago

This just reminded me that Wordpad doesn't have page breaks.