Thank you for responding! I feel silly, but what it was was that
"widow/orphan" was on. It took me hours to figure it out (with a grant
application fast approaching). I don't like Word. I'm a writer and I really
miss Wordperfect (the older Wordperfect, actually, where you could "reveal
codes" and see everything and pick for yourself.) I find Word assumes I want
it to do all kinds of automatic formatting for me which I'd rather do for
myself. And then it's almost impossible to see what's there. The little
question marky thingy is useless. It's like Word is catering to an illiterate
audience. You start writing a poem and it comes on and says "I see you're
writing a letter." Etc. Etc. I'd rather it spent less time on doing for me
what I can do for myself, and more on just making the formatting and other
"behind the scenes" things clear and accessible. Thanks for listening! And
thanks for responding to my post.

"Herb Tyson [MVP]" wrote:

Just checking here, because I don't know what grid you mean. Could the extra
space be from Before or After formatting, in Format - Paragraph - Spacing
tab, under Spacing?

If this isn't the issue, if you'd care to email me a copy of the document, I
can take a look. Send to problem(at)thetysons.org, replacing (a) with the @
sign.

--
Herb Tyson MS MVP
Please respond in the newsgroups so everyone can follow along.
"Karen M." wrote in message
news
At the bottom of the first page of my document, Word has inserted an extra
space. When I hit return it goes down once, as it should, but then it
skips a
line again, leaving me with a lot of extra unwanted space at the bottom of
my
first page. There is nothing wrong with the alignment is page layout (set
to
"top," not justify.) There are no manual page breaks, no section breaks,
and
"page break before" is not checked. I have tried cutting then repasting
the
text. I've tried backspacing then hitting return again for the paragraph.
I've tried to "find" any weird formatting in the document. Nothing works!
There is extra space at the bottom of the page (between what should be the
last two paragraphs), no matter what I do. I think it has something to do
with paragraph creation. The little grid which is supposed to show how
text
is justified shows up when I move the cursor to that extra white space.
Can
any brilliant expert help me? Much appreciation!