Word Resume Problems and How to Fix Them

Every one of these has a cause, and the fix is usually different from the workaround people reach for. Turn on formatting marks before starting; most of these become visible immediately.

1. A blank final page you cannot delete

Cause: a final empty paragraph mark that no longer fits on the previous page, or a table that ends exactly at the page boundary, which Word follows with a mandatory empty paragraph.

Fix: turn on formatting marks and find the stray paragraph mark on the blank page. Either delete it, or if Word refuses because it is the document’s final mark, select it and reduce its font size to 1 point and set line spacing to single. It then fits on the previous page and the blank page disappears.

2. Bullet indents drifting

Cause: mixed indentation methods. Some bullets are positioned by the paragraph style, others by tab presses or by dragging the ruler markers. They look identical and behave differently as you edit around them.

Fix: select all the bullets in the document, reapply the bullet style, then set the indent and hanging indent once in the style itself. Do not adjust individual paragraphs afterwards.

3. A job title stranded at the bottom of a page

Cause: no keep-with-next setting, so Word breaks wherever the text runs out.

Fix: apply keep with next to your job-line and section-heading styles, and keep lines together to body paragraphs. Word then refuses to separate a heading from what follows it. Resist the temptation to fix it with empty paragraphs, which breaks again the moment you edit anything above.

4. The layout changes on someone else’s machine

Cause: font substitution. Your font is not installed on their computer, so Word swaps it, and the replacement has different metrics. Line breaks move and a one-page resume becomes a page and a line.

Fix: send a PDF, using the route Microsoft documents for saving or converting to PDF. If you must send a Word file, use a widely available font. See the resume fonts guide.

5. Pasted text arrives with the wrong formatting

Cause: pasting carries the source formatting, including fonts, colours and styles from wherever it came from.

Fix: paste as plain text, then apply your style. If a document is already contaminated, select the affected region, clear formatting, and reapply. Clearing formatting removes bullets too, so reapply the bullet style afterwards.

6. Dates and employers refusing to line up

Cause: alignment built from repeated tab presses or, worse, spaces. Both depend on character widths, so they shift with any font or size change.

Fix: a single right-aligned tab stop at the right margin, with one Tab press between the two pieces of text. Set it in the style so every entry inherits it. Detail in Word resume formatting.

7. Automatic capitalisation and hyperlink mangling

Cause: autoformat. It capitalises after what it thinks are sentence ends, converts straight quotes, turns email addresses into blue underlined links, and occasionally changes a hyphen into a dash.

Fix: turn off the autoformat options you do not want before writing. Then check your document for blue underlined text, which looks careless in print, and for capitalised words mid-bullet where an abbreviation confused it.

8. Tracked changes and comments in a sent file

Cause: editing history the document retains and you stopped seeing.

Fix: accept or reject all changes, delete all comments, then run the Document Inspector, which removes hidden data and personal information including revision history and author names.

This matters more than it sounds. A resume containing tracked deletions shows a reader exactly what you took out, which occasionally includes a role you chose to omit.

9. Different margins on page two

Cause: a section break, often inherited from a template, giving each section its own page setup.

Fix: turn on formatting marks to see the break, then either delete it or set the page setup deliberately for each section. Microsoft documents what section breaks do, and the important point is that page setup applies per section, not per document, which is why changing margins sometimes only affects part of the file.

The diagnostic routine

When something is wrong and you cannot see why, do these four in order. It resolves most cases without knowing the cause.

1. Turn on formatting marks. Stray tabs, double paragraph marks, section breaks and empty paragraphs all become visible.
2. Click into the problem area and check what container you are in. Cell markers mean a table. A box outline means a text box.
3. Select the block and reapply the style. This resolves most formatting inconsistency in one action.
4. Export to PDF and read the result, rather than trusting the editing view. The PDF is what the recipient sees.

The nuclear option

Sometimes a document has been edited by too many hands and is not worth repairing.

Open a blank document, set up your four styles, then paste your content in as plain text and reapply the styles. Twenty minutes, and you have a clean file with no inherited structure. It is frequently faster than diagnosing an old one.

Save the result as your own template so the next resume starts from it. See advanced Word resume techniques.

Related

For the build, see the Microsoft Word resume guide. For the techniques that prevent these problems, see Word resume formatting. For templates that cause them, see Word resume templates. For alternatives, see the Google Docs resume guide.

Or avoid the whole category and build one free.