delete page break deletes extra pages

Question

delete page break deletes extra pages

I have a 6 page document -- letter size, landscape oriented, 2 colums per page, a graphic image only in each of the columns on the first 5 pages and in the first column of the 5th page. There is a page break after the last graphic image.

I want to delete the 6th page, which has nothing on it.

Pages Help says "To remove a page break, click at the beginning of the line that follows the break and press the Delete key." When I do this Pages deletes all the way back to the end of Page 2. It seems like I must be stuck with an extra page or lose more than half my document.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on here. This is very disconcerting and I'm wondering if Pages is even going to be an application I will be able to work with at all!

Posted on Sep 4, 2005 9:10 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Wyodor

Level 6

19,930 points

Sep 5, 2005 2:37 AM in response to Your Favorite Martian

Deleting a page break joins the information on both pages, it does not delete the content.

Try deleting the page in the page thumbnails view and see if that helps.

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Answer 2

Sep 6, 2005 6:17 PM in response to Your Favorite Martian

This ^%$ program will not let me delete a single page in thumbnail view. If I click on the blank thumbnail it just selects (yellow box around) ALL of the thumbnails. If I go to Edit:Delete Pages I just get a message asking me if I'm sure I want to delete pages 1-6 (and I only want to delete page 6). What kind of screwy software is this where it won't let the user delete one specific range of content?

It looks like I'm going to have to install iWork onto my Powerbook (it's just on my iMac now) and take this file over to the Apple Store.

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Answer 3

Peggy

Level 8

41,601 points

Sep 6, 2005 7:03 PM in response to Your Favorite Martian

Pages "sees" logical pages, not physical pages. When you click a thumbnail of a page you will see all of a single logical page selected in the thumbnail panel. To delete just a single physical page, place a section break before & after that page. Now, only that page will be selected in the thumbnail panel & only that page would be deleted.

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Answer 4

Sep 7, 2005 7:49 AM in response to Peggy

OK, I inserted a section break. Now I have an additional page -- page 7. When I click on the thumbnail, pages 6-7 are selected. When I go to Edit:Delete Pages it gives me the message that it is going to delete pages 6-7, which is what I want to do. When I click the delete button, however, the result is that pages 3-7 are deleted. IS THERE NO WAY FOR ME GET A DOCUMENT WITH JUST PAGES 1-5?

I do not understand this logic (if there is any). Furthermore, I can find NOTHING in either the Help system or User Guide which addresses these issues. What kind of convoluted logic is this program based on? I am not trying to do something which is particularly (even remotely) exotic. Can someone from Apple explain this to me!

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Answer 5

Sep 7, 2005 7:52 PM in response to Your Favorite Martian

Just spent an hour+ on the phone with a product specialist regarding this problem. Never, ever should something so simple be so difficult...

This is what worked for me, and should for you, too. It is basically a blow-by-blow of what Peggy attempts to describe in her post--which in theory is separating an entire Pages document into individual "pages".

1. For ease of viewing, reduce view to 25-50%.

2. Go to View>Show Layout.

3. Go to View>Show Page Thumbnails.

4. Go to the blank page that you want to delete in the regular view screen. (For sake of my example, it is page 3 of a 5-page Pages doc.)

5. Start at bottom R of blank page and mouse-click-drag toward L top of page. This should highlight a blue bar along the top margin or a series of paragraph place holders.

6. Delete (and don't worry that all your text has separated from the layout of the rest of the doc or pulled up, the next step should remedy that.)

7. Go to Insert>Section Break. (Yes, it will add in the deleted page again.)

8. Next, go to page 2 (page preceding the page you want to delete, repeat highlighting click as per step 1.)

9. DO NOT press DELETE this time, but go directly to Insert>Section Break.

10. Now, click on your thumbnails view. Your page three should now stand alone in its own yellow box, meaning it is its own section.

11. With that blank page highlighted yellow, you can either delete or go to EDIT>Delete Pages. This should get rid of the blasted blank page.

12. Check the remainder of your doc to be sure no other pics or text have "disappeared". I've seen such postings, and it happened to me on the first pass.

CAVEAT! Check the remainder of your doc to make sure photos and text are still present WITH EACH STEP. In the first trial run of this fix-it, random pics toward the end of my doc were gone. Thankfully, I hadn't saved, so I quit out without saving, thus recovering what appeared to be lost.

Finally, it seems the default on this program should be that each individual page stands on its own. This same issue of lumping all the pages in one Pages doc. becomes more of a problem when you want to shuffle or work on layout, swapping out spreads, etc.

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Answer 6

Sep 7, 2005 11:38 PM in response to Cara Lowe

Cara - thank you for your effort. Unfortunately it did not work for me. My document has 5 pages I want to keep and a 6th and 7th I want to delete. Following your instructions gave me an 8 page document, from which I could separate the first (relevant) 5 pages from the rest in thumbnail view. I was able to delete pages 7 and 8, but when I tried to delete page 6, the program again deleted all the way back through page 3. Somehow when I delete page 6 (even when it is selected separately in thumbnail view), pages 3-5 are also deleted. Maybe this has something to do with the page break at the end of page 5, but when I try to delete this page break I also get the effect of pages 3-5 being deleted.

Whoever the moron was who designed this software should be drawn and quartered. This is something which of course should be a simple procedure. That it took so many steps for you to be able to accomplish this simple task and that I still am yet able to accomplish it speaks volumes about how this program will be a colossal failure for Apple. They own us all a BIG apology for releasing such a monumental piece of garbage to the public.

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Answer 7

Sep 18, 2005 9:23 PM in response to Your Favorite Martian

Martian,
If I understand you correctly, you have 5 pages of data which you would like to keep. You are trying to remove a 6th page which is blank and showed up after you added a page break. Is this correct?
One last item of note, to isolate your data between pages, you will need to use a section break, not a page break.

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