If you copy and paste a large portion of text in a Microsoft Office Word business document, all blank lines are also pasted into your document. These blank lines are unnecessary and can damage your formatting. Removing an empty line is simple if space is a simple line. Incorrect paragraph settings can also create blank lines between sentences. To remove blank lines due to paragraph settings, you need to change these settings.

Remove all empty lines with Find and Replace

The Find and Replace function in Word is often used to remove all empty lines, but you must know which blank lines are called manual line breaks in the Find What option.

1. Click Replace on the Home tab. See screenshot:

2. When the Find and Replace dialog box appears, click the More >> button to display more options.

3. Place the cursor in the Find What field, and choose Manual Line Break from the Special pull-down menu.

4. There should be a ” ^ l ” character in the Find What field, and click Replace All.

Remove all blank rows with VBA

Alternatively, you can use the macro to remove all empty lines with VBA code, and you can follow below instructions as below:

1. Press ” Alt + F11 ” to open the Microsoft Visual Basic for Application window.

2. Click Insert > Module, and then copy below VBA code into the module window.

VBA code removes all manual line breaks in document:

Sub Deleemptylines ()
Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
With Selection.Find
.Text = “^ l”
.Replacement.Text = “”
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
.Format = False
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchByte = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchWildcards = False
.MatchFuzzy = False
End With
Selection.Find.Execute Replace: = wdReplaceAll
End Sub

3. Then press the Run Sub button

to run the code, the interrupted parts are removed.

Note: This VBA code has been tested successfully in Word 2010 and 2013.

Remove blank text in Word

1. Open the document that contains the blank lines that were generated by incorrect paragraph formatting.

2. Double-click anywhere inside the paragraph that contains blank lines to select the entire section.

3. Right-click on the selected paragraph and select “ Paragraph ” from the context menu to open its settings window.

4. Select the ” Indents and Spacing ” tab if it is not already selected.

5. Select “ Single ” in the “ Line Spacing ” box in the Spacing section.

6. Click “ OK ” to delete the blank lines within the paragraph.

7. Press “ Ctrl-S ” to save the new version of the document after you have deleted all blank lines from the paragraph.