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About this lesson

Learn how to control spaces between paragraphs all at one time and adjust spacing as needed.

Quick reference

Paragraph Spacing

Learn how to control spaces between paragraphs all at one time and adjust spacing as needed.

When to use

Controlling the space between paragraphs is very important.  Spacing is necessary to help the reader determine where paragraphs start and stop.  But pressing “Enter” on the keyboard to force that space is only one option.  A better option is to use the Paragraph Spacing function in under the Layout ribbon.

Instructions

Layout Ribbon
​Home Ribbon, Show/Hide Button   

  1. Select the paragraphs to apply spacing to.
  2. Click Layout ribbon, Spacing:
    ​ ​
  3. Change the Before and After settings to your desired size.
  4. You can do this manually within the document by pressing the enter key between each paragraph as you type.  This was the method used when typewriters were the main equipment in offices.
  5. To see if spaces have been placed manually or automatically with the Spacing feature, click the Home ribbon and turn on the Show/Hide button to view the background codes on the screen. ​​
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  • 00:04 Paragraph spacing inside a document is incredibly important because
  • 00:08 the whitespace between the paragraphs helps the reader skip to the next
  • 00:12 paragraph and so forth.
  • 00:14 Now, back in the days of typewriters, we would click at the end, or I'm sorry,
  • 00:18 we wouldn't click, we would just hit Enter on our typewriters at the end of
  • 00:22 a paragraph to apply the spacing.
  • 00:24 Well, what happens there?
  • 00:25 I want to show you this. I'm going to go to my Home ribbon,
  • 00:28 going to activate my Show/Hide.
  • 00:30 And you can see that a paragraph mark is at the end of each paragraph, and
  • 00:34 then an extra one between the paragraphs.
  • 00:37 Well, with word processing technology, we don't need that extra paragraph spacing.
  • 00:41 So we're going to get rid of that, and we're going to do this a different way.
  • 00:45 Before I start this, I'm going to go ahead and turn off my codes,
  • 00:48 the Show/Hide codes, so it looks nice and clean.
  • 00:51 And now, we're going to apply this on the Layout ribbon.
  • 00:55 There is a group called Paragraph.
  • 00:57 Right here, we have Before 0 point, After 0 point.
  • 01:01 Well, what is a point?
  • 01:02 A point is basically your font size.
  • 01:05 In this case, I'm using Calibri size 12.
  • 01:08 So if I want spacing after a paragraph to be a full,
  • 01:12 the same size as my font, I'm going to put 12 points.
  • 01:18 Because I was clicked into this paragraph, it only applied to that paragraph, and
  • 01:22 I have a full 12 point between them.
  • 01:24 Well, I'm going to Ctrl+Z to undo that,
  • 01:25 and this time, we're going to do it correctly.
  • 01:27 We'll select the entire document.
  • 01:29 So I'm going to click the first line, Ctrl+Shift+End, E-N-D,
  • 01:34 your End button, to select your entire, all the paragraphs.
  • 01:38 Now, let's do that again.
  • 01:40 On the Layout ribbon, Paragraph, this time, instead of 12 points,
  • 01:45 I'm going to only apply 6, half my font size, and hit Enter.
  • 01:49 And there we go.
  • 01:50 You can see what's happening over on the Navigation pane.
  • 01:53 How about we change that to 12 points?
  • 01:56 Do that again, 12 points, and it's spilled to the second page.
  • 01:59 See, that's why you would want to adjust it.
  • 02:01 In this particular case, if I absolutely want this document on one page,
  • 02:06 see, I can play with these numbers until I get exactly the right point and
  • 02:11 the white space, but to make it all stay on one page.
  • 02:14 Now, one more thing I want to show you in here.
  • 02:17 On the Paragraph group in the corner is a dialog box operator, this little arrow,
  • 02:21 that means we have more options hidden behind there.
  • 02:24 So let's click that and open it up.
  • 02:28 And here we can see on the Indents and Spacing,
  • 02:31 we have the Spacing group again, the Before 0 point, the After 8 points.
  • 02:36 Every once in a while, I don't want spacing between paragraphs of the same
  • 02:40 style, like a numbered list or a bulleted list, I don't want a full space.
  • 02:45 We can also change the line spacing options to Single, 1.5 lines,
  • 02:50 Double lines, that would make it double spaced within the paragraph lines itself.
  • 02:55 I don't want that either, so I'm going to leave that at Single, and
  • 02:59 I'm going to hit OK.
  • 03:00 I'm not going to make any changes in here.
  • 03:02 I prefer to just stay in the document and work on my Before and
  • 03:06 After spacing on the Layout ribbon right up on top.
  • 03:09 Great time to practice this.
  • 03:11 You need to get really good at this and understand what it does,
  • 03:15 it will save you so much time of trying to format something to fit on one page.
  • 03:20 All right, practice it and have fun.

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