How to Remove Blank Lines in Word
Extra blank lines in a Word document usually come from pasted content, merged sections, or someone hitting Enter a few too many times between paragraphs. Word doesn't have a one-click "remove blank lines" button, but Find & Replace handles it once you know the syntax - and there's a genuine gotcha in how Word represents "blank lines" that's worth understanding before you start deleting things.
Find & Replace with paragraph marks
Word represents the end of a paragraph - what you get when you press Enter - as a paragraph mark, written as ^p in Find & Replace. A blank line is really just an empty paragraph: two paragraph marks back to back with nothing between them.
- Press
Ctrl+Hto open Find & Replace. - In the "Find what" field, enter
^p^p. - In the "Replace with" field, enter
^p. - Click "Replace All."
This finds every place where two paragraph marks sit next to each other (an empty paragraph) and collapses them into one. One thing worth knowing: for a document with long runs of several blank paragraphs stacked together, a single click of "Replace All" may not fully collapse the whole run in one pass - Word replaces non-overlapping matches left to right, so four consecutive blank paragraphs might only reduce to two after the first pass. Click "Replace All" again (Word will tell you how many replacements it made) until it reports zero, and you're done.
A faster way, with wildcards
If you check "Use wildcards" in the Find & Replace dialog (click "More >>" to reveal it), Word supports pattern quantifiers, which means you can collapse runs of any length in a single pass. But there's a catch: enabling wildcards changes what the special character codes mean. With wildcards on, a paragraph mark is no longer ^p - it's ^13 (its underlying character code). So the wildcard version looks like this:
- Check "Use wildcards."
- Find what:
^13{2,} - Replace with:
^13 - Click "Replace All."
^13{2,} matches two or more consecutive paragraph marks in one go, and Word collapses them all down to a single ^13 (one paragraph mark) in a single pass - no repeated clicking needed. The tradeoff is that ^p, ^t, and Word's other everyday shortcuts don't work the same way once wildcards are on, which is a common source of "why did my pattern stop working" confusion if you're used to the non-wildcard syntax.
See what you're deleting first: Show/Hide
If typing find-and-replace codes makes you nervous about deleting the wrong thing, Word has a way to see exactly what you're working with before you touch anything: go to the Home tab and click the¶ (Show/Hide) button, or press Ctrl+Shift+8. This reveals every paragraph mark, space, and tab character directly in your document as small visible symbols. Blank lines show up as a lone ¶ symbol sitting on its own line with nothing else - so you can scroll through, confirm what's actually blank versus what just looks blank, and get a feel for your document's structure before running Find & Replace on it.
The Enter vs. Shift+Enter trap
This is the detail that trips people up most: pressing Enter creates a paragraph mark (^p), but pressing Shift+Enter creates a manual line break (^l) - a different character that starts a new line without starting a new paragraph. They often look identical on the page, but Find & Replace treats them completely differently. A search for ^p^p will never match a blank line created with Shift+Enter, because there's no paragraph mark there to find.
If you've run the ^p^p replacement above and some blank lines are still stubbornly sitting in your document, this is almost always why. The fix is the same idea with the other character: search for ^l^l (or ^p^l,^l^p, depending on how the breaks are mixed with paragraphs) and replace with ^p or ^l as appropriate. Turning on Show/Hide first makes this much easier to diagnose, since manual line breaks and paragraph marks render as visibly different symbols (a bent arrow for a line break, a ¶ for a paragraph mark).
Working in a spreadsheet instead?
If your blank lines are actually rows in Excel rather than paragraphs in a Word document, the Find & Replace approach here doesn't apply - see ourguide to removing blank lines in Excel instead, which covers Go To Special and a VBA macro for that case.
Skip Word's Find & Replace entirely
If you'd rather not deal with ^p codes, wildcard mode, or the Enter-vs-Shift+Enter distinction at all, copy your text out of Word and paste it intoRemove Blank Lines - it strips every blank line instantly in your browser, regardless of what character originally created it, then you can paste the cleaned result back in.
This guide is part of our full roundup offree tools for cleaning up messy text, covering duplicate lines, blank lines, extra spaces, and dirty CSV exports.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the actual difference between ^p and ^l in Word?
^p is a paragraph mark, created by pressing Enter - it ends the current paragraph and starts a new one, and it's what Word's paragraph-spacing settings (space before/after) apply to. ^l is a manual line break, created by pressing Shift+Enter - it moves to a new line visually but stays inside the same paragraph, so paragraph spacing doesn't apply to it. Find & Replace treats them as entirely different characters, so a pattern built around one won't catch the other.
Why didn't Replace All remove all my blank lines in one click?
Two likely reasons. First, if you have long runs of several blank paragraphs stacked together, a single non-wildcard ^p^p to ^p pass may only partially collapse them - click "Replace All" again until Word reports zero replacements. Second, some of your "blank lines" might actually be manual line breaks (^l) rather than paragraph marks (^p), which a ^p^p search won't match at all.
Do I need to enable "Use wildcards" for this to work?
No - the basic ^p^p to ^p method works without it, though you may need to click "Replace All" more than once for longer runs of blank lines. Wildcards let you do it in a single pass, but they also change what some other special-character codes mean, so only enable them if you're comfortable with that tradeoff.
Will this remove intentional spacing I want to keep, like a blank line between sections?
The ^p^p to ^p method collapses any run of blank paragraphs down to exactly one, so if you want zero blank lines between sections, run it again on the result, or replace with nothing (leave "Replace with" empty) instead of ^p to remove single blank paragraphs entirely rather than just collapsing runs.
Is there a way to preview what will be deleted before running Replace All?
Word's Find & Replace doesn't offer a live preview, but turning on Show/Hide (Ctrl+Shift+8) first lets you see every paragraph mark and line break directly in your document, so you know exactly what you're about to search-and-replace before you click anything.