MS Word "Bounce" Problem

[hudwrite]

Hello,

I am preparing a poetry mss. for publication. Initially, I keyed in the poems without regard to the space between poems. Now I am placing the poems where they belong, with the title on the first line of the page. In doing so, I am experiencing a nagging problem.

Let's say, right now, there are two poems on one page, so I push the second poem down with the enter key one line at a time. When I finally push the title down to the first line of the next page, where I want it, it "bounces" several lines down farther on the page. So I delete spaces above it to bring the title up to the top and it bounces back up to the preceding page.

In other words, the poem doesn't move one line with one press of the enter or delete key when it is near the page break. This has never happened to me before with a similar size document on the same system running Office 2000 in XP. Has this happened to you before, and what is the solution?

Thank you.

[slcboston]

I'm going to suggest that this goes in "Tech Help" rather than here (any mods in the mind for a mood).

I'm also going to suggest, more specifically for your problem, that if you're placing one poem per page you try using the "Page Break" function (in the "Insert" drop-down menu) instead of using the enter key. :)

[blacbird]

Echo what sclboston said about the Page Break function. Otherwise, you're probably encountering the issue with Widows/Orphans, a function Word leaves on as a default, and you have to turn off under the Format/Paragraph Menu (in pre-Vista versions of MS-Word, at least). But setting hard Page breaks immediately at the end of each poem should cure your problem.

caw

[writermom]

try using the "Page Break" function (in the "Insert" drop-down menu) instead of using the enter key. :)

Control + Enter

[hudwrite]

The page break function does the trick.