MS Word inserts page breaks in pasted text ... and I can't delete them!

Well, it's still a mystery, then. The questions are not in table cells, and I don't have any "keep with next" paragraphs. I've just used added spaces to deal with orphan/widow control where questions break across pages.

I just repeated the issue with a new doc. Here is the source material selected:

Here is the pasted text in the new document:

And here is a screen cap of me selecting those rogue page breaks and attempting to delete them. You can see one page break, selected, deleted, BAM: previous continuous break is now a page break. Selected that one, deleted, BAM: new page break appears.

[...or not. I can't see how to attach a screen recording! The image uploader freezes, and drag-and-drop looks like it will work, but then the file disappears.]

Thank you, Stefan,

This is an exam, and the section I was trying to copy was about 10 multiple-choice questions, so it did have a lot of formatting breaks, but no page breaks or keep-withs. Just breaks to go back and forth between single column (question) and double-column (answer options). If I deleted a rogue page break in the pasted content, it would convert the last section break to a page break. I tried selecting the page break and going to insert> section break - continuous to replace the page break with a section break, but no dice. Eventually I found that if I deleted the last few questions, though, it deleted the problem with them, so I just had to re-create two or three questions rather than all 10. That seems to align with your suggestion that the breaks are at fault. Still ... WTH? Is there a number of section breaks that MS considers "too many"? This doesn't seem like a particularly unusual or fancy use of copy-paste.

Are these exam questions inside table cells? In that case, text flow formatting has no effect on the text level, but "Keep with next" (for example) does affect whole table rows. Also, if a table is involved, you will have to consider table-specific options.

As far as I know, there is no limit to the number of section breaks in a Word document. However, regarding text formatting, you can have "too many" paragraphs that are formatted as "Keep with next." For example, if you enable that option for all text paragraphs in a document, this is going to work fine for any document that is just one page long. As soon as the text will not fit on one page, Word will struggle with the "Keep with next" option, obviously.

Thank you, Stefan,

This is an exam, and the section I was trying to copy was about 10 multiple-choice questions, so it did have a lot of formatting breaks, but no page breaks or keep-withs. Just breaks to go back and forth between single column (question) and double-column (answer options). If I deleted a rogue page break in the pasted content, it would convert the last section break to a page break. I tried selecting the page break and going to insert> section break - continuous to replace the page break with a section break, but no dice. Eventually I found that if I deleted the last few questions, though, it deleted the problem with them, so I just had to re-create two or three questions rather than all 10. That seems to align with your suggestion that the breaks are at fault. Still ... WTH? Is there a number of section breaks that MS considers "too many"? This doesn't seem like a particularly unusual or fancy use of copy-paste.

Dear Brantlee,

Do you mean that the symbol like the following? If yes, I suggest you click on Show/Hide to see if it disappears.

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If it is convenient, for us to confirm the issue symptom, I'd like you to record a video showing the issue in your environment for our reference.

If the video and the video link can be shared here directly, please add your confirmation and just provide the link here.

If no, welcome to let us know and we'll take the next step to collect the video.

Welcome to share any updates when you have time.

Thanks for your time and effort.

Sincerely

Cliff | Microsoft Community Moderator