To not add paragraph spacing between paragraphs of the same style, check the “Don’t add space between paragraphs of the same style” checkbox. Set both the amount of spacing before and after each paragraph by using the spinner arrows next to each box. The “Before” and “After” boxes determine the amount, measured in points, of spacing before and after the selected paragraphs. To set the line and paragraph spacing, use the spinner boxes, checkbox and drop-down in the “Spacing” section. To set the paragraph indentation, use the spinner boxes, checkbox and drop-down in the “Indentation” section. Separately, the “Alignment” drop-down in the “General” section lets you apply paragraph alignment. You can set all the properties of selected paragraphs using this dialog box. If needed, then click the “Indents and Spacing” tab to view and change these settings. Then click the “Paragraph” dialog box button in the lower-right corner of the “Paragraph” button group. To then open the “Paragraph” dialog box in Word to set the line spacing and paragraph spacing for the selected paragraphs, click the “Home” tab in the Ribbon. To adjust multiple paragraphs, click and drag over the paragraphs to select them.
To adjust a single paragraph, click into it. Before you do this, however, first select the paragraphs to adjust in the document.
You can set line spacing and paragraph spacing in Word on the “Indents and Spacing” tab of the “Paragraph” dialog box. Paragraph spacing is the amount of space before and after the paragraphs in a document. Line spacing is the amount of space between each line in your paragraph. You can set line spacing and paragraph spacing in Word.
Please support this website by making a donation to help keep it free of advertising and to help towards cost of time spent adding new content.Set Line Spacing and Paragraph Spacing in Word: Overview The Line Spacing setting determines the seperation between lines within the same paragraph. Tweaking the white space, if needs be, takes seconds, even in the longest document. Using styles in this way provides you with very fine control over the white space throughout your document. You combine the After setting of the current element with the Before setting of the following element to establish the white space between the two elements in question. Others include cm (centimetre) and pi (pica): These you increase or decrease using the spinners or by inputting values and their units. In the Spacing section there are the Before and After settings. Let’s examine the “Heading 1” style starting in the Modify Style dialog box:īy clicking the Format button and choosing Paragraph…, we can work on the properties of “Heading 1” that determine the amount of which space accorded to it. The same document showing that there are no empty paragraphs, the space between headings and body text being determined by the styles: This is the document set with Heading 1, Heading 2 and Normal styles:
To provide fine control we’ll set the document in styles - see How to Use Styles in Microsoft Word for details of how to apply styles. Unless you start tedious and time-consuming fiddling with the properties of individual paragraphs, using empty paragraphs allows no fine control over spacing.
Show/Hide ¶ exposes the author’s use of empty paragraphs to separate elements in the document: This document has been created by its author without resort to the use of Word styles: Hence this page on using styles to control white space.
Persisting in using - that throw back to of the manual typewriter - is unproductive and is the cause of much frustration and tedium when spacing needs to be altered. As does to produce extra white space between paragraphs. The temptation to press to complete a heading and to add space between it and the following text remains common practice amongst authors using Microsoft Word.