You’ve probably experienced the thrill of printing a document and discovering that you have a line of text where it doesn’t belong. The technical term for a single line or a couple of words that ends up at the top of the next page is a widow. An orphan is a first line of a paragraph that ends up as the last line of a page or column. Neither situation is good.
The problem is that Word’s automatic page breaks sometimes fall where you don’t want them. Widows and orphans aren’t the only document problems you’ll encounter either. For example, if your document has headings, you don’t want a heading to end up on a different page than the text that goes with it. And if you have a bulleted list, you don’t want one sad, lonely bullet left off by itself.
Fortunately, Word has widow and orphan controls enabled in the Normal style by default. So if you’re one of those people who never peek into the world of styles and no one else messes with the Normal style, widows and orphans may never be a problem for you. You can check by choosing Format|Paragraph and clicking the Line and Page Breaks tab. Widow/Orphan control should have a checkmark next to it.
The Paragraph dialog box can help in those other situations too. For example, to keep your bullets together, just highlight the list and choose Format|Paragraph. In the Line and Page Breaks tab, click next to Keep lines together and all your bullets now travel as a unit.
If you have two paragraphs that always have to stay together, like a heading and it’s related text, highlight the first paragraph and choose Format|Paragraph again. In the Line and Page Breaks tab, click the Keep With Next check box.
Of course, for maximum flexibility, you also can do the opposite and punt text off a given page. Instead of adding a lot of hard page breaks by pressing Ctrl+Enter, you can use the Page Break Before command. For example, suppose you have a figure that you want to be on a page by itself. To force Word to add a page break, place your cursor in the paragraph that contains the figure, choose Format|Paragraph and click the Line and Page Breaks tab. Then click the Page Break Before check box.