I have Office 365 Personal, which means that I have Office 2013, on my desktop (because of a Surface Pro 3 purchase).

When I am working in Word and open an existing file in the process of editing specifications from my master specification, there appears in this original file one or several "breaks" that were not originally in the file. I call them ghost breaks because they behave as page breaks, leaving white space, and they can only be seen in draft view as a dotted line, not labeled as to type of break. After wasting much time with Microsoft Technical Support to no avail, they sent me to this site among a list of 4 self-help sites.

I did discover that, if I save the file as a Word 97-2003 document, the breaks evaporate into the ether.

That is all.

Hi Steve,

Based on your description, did you mean the single dotted line in dotted line as shown in the following figure?

If yes, this is single dotted line indicated an automatic page break. These breaks appear as lines extending the full width of your document window. The type of break is denoted by text in the middle of the line.

You cannot get rid of automatic page breaks, but if you add a manual break in Word, they wont appear.

And I test it in Office 2010 and Office 2007, I get the same result.

If my understanding is incorrect you didnt mean the dotted line as shown in the following figure.

Please upload a screenshot so that I can get more accurate solutions to this problem.

If you have no verified to post the screenshot, I suggest you upload the screenshot via OneDrive.

Or you could send this screenshot to our email address:

ibsofc@microsoft.com I'd like to help you check it.

Please Note: The email subject you should use the URL or the Title Name of your case.

Im glad to help you and follow up your reply.

Hope its helpful.

Regards,

George Zhao
TechNet Community Support