Paragraph Spacing

Quick reference

• 00:04 >> In this lesson, I'm gonna teach you about Paragraph Spacing.
• 00:07 It's an incredibly important function to know about.
• 00:10 It's located on the Page Layout Ribbon right over here.
• 00:13 It says, spacing at the top, and the group name is called Paragraph.
• 00:18 Notice that it includes before 0 points and after 10 points.
• 00:22 That is referring to spacing before and after a paragraph.
• 00:26 If you'll take a look at the document that's on the screen or
• 00:29 in your exercise file.
• 00:30 Notice I've got, and don't worry about the text in here.
• 00:34 We're focused on the paragraph spacing in this document.
• 00:37 Notice there's nice spacing between all these paragraphs.
• 00:40 Well, when we used to use typewriters, to get that spacing,
• 00:43 we would have to hit, Enter,
• 00:45 between each one of these paragraphs to get a nice little break in the spacing.
• 00:50 Well right now,
• 00:50 if I hit my Down-Arrow, you can see my insertion point flashing right here.
• 00:54 When I hit my down arrow, that insertion point jumps to the next one.
• 00:59 It doesn't take a pause and
• 01:00 stop between them, that's because paragraph spacing has been applied.
• 01:04 And now, I can look up at my page layout.
• 01:07 And I can see, that a ten point space
• 01:10 basically the equivalent to a font size has been applied after this paragraph.
• 01:15 Now, this is in conjunction with another tool called the Show/Hide Button.
• 01:20 When I click on the Home button, right over here, is a button called Show/Hide.
• 01:24 I'm going to turn this on, and the screen is going to look a little messy,
• 01:27 but look what happens.
• 01:28 I turn that on.
• 01:29 Each one of these paragraph marks is basically, someone hit the hard return or
• 01:35 the enter key, called a hard return, on the keyboard.
• 01:39 Notice there's tiny little polka dots in here, those are all spaces.
• 01:42 And if there was an arrow key, that would represent a tab.
• 01:46 I wonder if I can get and arrow to show up here.
• 01:49 Yes, because I hit my tab key and an arrow showed up.
• 01:52 So these are called codes.
• 01:53 They're Background Codes.
• 01:54 They do not print but they're very important to understand what they are.
• 01:58 Anyway, when we're dealing with paragraph spacing,
• 02:00 it's interesting to understand that when I hit, Enter key.
• 02:03 Right here at the end of the this first paragraph, when I hit,
• 02:06 Enter key, paragraph mark shows up.
• 02:08 Now this particular paragraph mark, if I go to my page layout,
• 02:12 has 10 points applied after it.
• 02:15 So if the paragraph above it has 10 points, and the paragraph mark has 10
• 02:19 points, suddenly, I've got a 20 points divide between these paragraphs.
• 02:23 When I turn off, so I go back to my home ribbon.
• 02:26 And I turn off this show hide key, look at this huge gap between these paragraphs.
• 02:32 Now at a glance, you gonna think, what is going on with that?
• 02:34 Why is that a huge paragraph or huge space in there?
• 02:38 When I jump down with my insertion point,
• 02:41 I'm pressing my arrow keys on my keyboard up and down.
• 02:44 You can see it's pauses in between them that usually represents,
• 02:48 there is an enter key there.
• 02:50 And all we have to do is delete it.
• 02:52 It is easier to see them when you turn on that show/hide button.
• 02:55 And now, I could just hit, Delete.
• 02:57 And get rid of that.
• 02:58 Well now, let's go ahead and
• 02:59 see what happens when I turn off paragraph spacing for these few paragraphs.
• 03:03 I'll simply highlight that section of text, come up to my page layout, and
• 03:08 I, instead of 10 points, I'm gonna tell this 0 points between these paragraphs.
• 03:14 And there you go.
• 03:15 We have just jammed them all together.
• 03:17 It's very difficult to read text when it's all jammed together with no
• 03:21 space between those texts.
• 03:23 Between those paragraphs.
• 03:25 I've turned off my show hide button, so
• 03:27 you can see how difficult this would be to determine.
• 03:30 Okay, where does the next one start?
• 03:32 And where does one of them end?
• 03:33 It's very important to add space.
• 03:35 Now, I could do it manually by hitting enter between them.
• 03:39 And what this does, it applies the same size font,
• 03:44 which is 11 right now, between all of these paragraphs.
• 03:48 Well, I'm trying to save room.
• 03:49 So I don't necessarily want a size 11 between these paragraphs.
• 03:53 So I'm undoing what I just did.
• 03:55 I'm going to highlight these paragraphs.
• 03:57 I'm going to come up to my Page Layout and I'm going to tell it, I just want a nice,
• 04:01 simple, how about a size 8 point font between these paragraphs,
• 04:06 8-point space between them.
• 04:08 When I click off of that, there you go.
• 04:11 It's not a full size as a font.
• 04:13 Font's size 11, space between paragraph size 8.
• 04:17 Save room, still gives a visual divide.
• 04:19 If you want, you can go to the home ribbon.
• 04:22 Turn your show/hide coats on,
• 04:23 to make sure there are no hard returns or enter keys between the paragraphs.
• 04:27 Now you are controlling the spacing between these paragraphs.
• 04:31 It's a great feature to know, especially when someone sends you a document.
• 04:34 You can't understand how they laid out the spacing, this is how you figure it out.
• 04:39 Just click on Page Layout and
• 04:41 take a little look at this section right over here.

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