Word automatically suppresses Space Before at the top of a page except after
a manual page break or section break (and you can choose to still suppress
the space after a page break using the Compatibility Options). But that
applies only to Space Before applied to the paragraph style. If you are
using an empty paragraph to create a blank line, then Word treats it like
any other paragraph, which is why this technique is not recommended.
WordPerfect does have the ability to suppress one empty paragraph at the top
of a page, but for many years it was far behind Word in paragraph formatting
options such as Space Before/After.
