Paragraph Spacing

Quick reference

• 00:05 Paragraph spacing is so important to understand that it's an intermediate
• 00:09 level, but you've got to really embrace this and understand it.
• 00:12 So first of all, on my home ribbon I have a little button right over here.
• 00:15 This is the Show/Hide button.
• 00:17 I'm going to turn this on for this lesson, so I don't want it to confuse you.
• 00:21 But what's happening in the background is these are all background codes.
• 00:24 They're called non-printing characters and
• 00:27 like the polka dots between the words are space bars.
• 00:30 And, then the paragraph marks are where the enter key has been pressed
• 00:34 on the keyboard, all right.
• 00:35 It's very important because notice between the paragraphs, there's no enter key.
• 00:40 It's just white space right there, okay no enter key.
• 00:42 All right, let's go ahead and click on the layout ribbon and on the Layout Ribbon,
• 00:47 this is our paragraph spacing section.
• 00:50 So I can see my indents are not set at all, and on the right, here's my spacing.
• 00:55 This means before a paragraph, and after a paragraph.
• 00:59 Now when I'm talking about paragraph, I mean, the paragraph mark right there.
• 01:04 So I've got zero points before, but ten points after.
• 01:08 Now the ten points means like a size ten font of space is after
• 01:14 this paragraph mark and that explains why no extra paragraph mark between these, but
• 01:18 there is space between those.
• 01:20 That is how you create space between paragraphs.
• 01:23 Now why do you want to do that?
• 01:25 Well, for this reason I'm going to click on the View ribbon.
• 01:28 I'm going to view multiple pages.
• 01:30 This document has one full page of writing and a couple extra lines right over here.
• 01:35 Hm, well, I really wanted this to be a one page document.
• 01:40 I've got to bring those two lines back in here.
• 01:42 I don't want to shrink my font, I wonder what I could adjust.
• 01:46 The paragraph spacing can be adjusted.
• 01:49 All right, so, with the view still on two pages,
• 01:53 I'm gonna come back to Layout and then click and drag all my text right here.
• 01:59 And I know it looks small I'll try to raise it up a little bit so
• 02:03 I've selected all my text and
• 02:05 instead of ten points I wonder if I change my paragraph spacing to six points.
• 02:11 And when I click off of it, look what happened.
• 02:14 No second page.
• 02:16 I only have one page.
• 02:18 I was able to bring it back in by simply telling it, I don't want a 10 point
• 02:24 font size of space between my paragraphs, I want a 6 point of font size space.
• 02:31 Wow that's a long sentence to say, it's a big phrase.
• 02:34 So the point is,
• 02:35 you have full control over how much space between these paragraphs.
• 02:39 Now, let's do this again.
• 02:41 Let's do it the old fashioned way, which means I'm going to highlight all of this,
• 02:45 then I tell it I don't want any space at all.
• 02:48 Zero, 0 points.
• 02:50 And I'm going to jam all of this together.
• 02:53 Does that look difficult to read to you?
• 02:56 Yes.
• 02:56 Even in the old fashioned days on typewriters we would put an extra
• 03:00 enter key between each paragraph.
• 03:03 Now that Enter key, can anyone tell me what size, here's a little clue,
• 03:07 look at that my quick access bar.
• 03:09 Can you tell me what size that Enter key is?
• 03:12 You bet, that's a size 11.
• 03:14 So when I put a bunch of those to give it the old fashioned way of
• 03:18 putting a space between paragraphs, welcome to my second page.
• 03:22 I just defeated everything I did.
• 03:24 So the reality is sometimes manually entering a space, or a hard return,
• 03:31 in between paragraphs stretches a document to be all we want resisting to be legible.
• 03:37 And so in that case,
• 03:38 also set controls a few times until it goes back to what it was.
• 03:42 In that case, just by putting 6 points after every paragraph spot,
• 03:47 it fixed it all, so that is a lesson in paragraph spacing, that is why we use it.
• 03:53 And you have total control if you only knew it was there.
• 03:57 Layout ribbon, paragraph, and just adjust these guys.
• 04:00 Alright, thank you.

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