Lines and Paragraph
Spacing
Prepared by: Robilyn B. Pataras
Introduction
As you design your document and make
formatting decisions, you will need to
consider line and paragraph spacing.
You can increase spacing to improve
readability and reduce it to fit more text on the
page.
Line Spacing
Line spacing is the space between each
line in a paragraph. Word allows you to
customize the line spacing to be single
spaced (one line high), double spaced (two
lines high), or any other amount you want.
The default spacing in Word is 1.08 lines, which
is slightly larger than single spaced.
In the images below, you can compare different types of
line spacing. From left to right, these images show default
line spacing, single spacing, and double spacing.
Open the practice document:
1. Select the text you want to
format.
2. On the Home tab, click the Line and
Paragraph Spacing command, then
select the desired line spacing.
3. The line spacing will change in
the document.
Adjusting line spacing
Your line spacing options aren't limited to the ones in
the Line and Paragraph Spacing menu.
To adjust spacing with more precision, select Line
Spacing Options from the menu to access
the Paragraph dialog box.
You'll then have a few additional options you can use to
customize spacing.
Exactly: When you choose this option, the line
spacing is measured in points, just like font
size. For example, if you're using 12-point text,
you could use 15-point spacing.
At least: Like the the Exactly option, this
lets you choose how many points of
spacing you want. However, if you have
different sizes of text on the same line, the
spacing will expand to fit the larger text.
Multiple: This option lets you type
the number of lines of spacing you
want. For example,
choosing Multiple and changing the
spacing to 1.2 will make the text
slightly more spread out than single-
spaced text. If you want the lines to
be closer together, you can choose a
smaller value, like 0.9.
Paragraph spacing
Just as you can format spacing between lines in
your document, you can adjust spacing before
and after paragraphs.
This is useful for separating paragraphs,
headings, and subheadings.
To format paragraph spacing:
In our example, we'll increase the space before
each paragraph to separate them a bit more.
This will make it a little easier to read.
1. Select the paragraph or paragraphs
you want to format.
2. On the Home tab, click the Line and
Paragraph Spacing command. Click Add Space
Before Paragraph or Remove Space After
Paragraph from the drop-down menu.
In our example, we'll select Add Space Before
Paragraph.
3. The paragraph spacing will change in
the document.
From the drop-down menu,
you can also select Line
Spacing Options to open
the Paragraph dialog box.
From here, you can control
how much space there
is before and after the
paragraph.
Tip:
You can use Word's convenient Set as
Default feature to save all of
the formatting changes you've made and
automatically apply them to new
documents.
ACTIVITY:
Open our practice document.
Select the the date and the address block. This starts with April
13, 2016, and ends with Trenton, NJ 08601.
Change the spacing before the paragraph to 12 pt and the
spacing after the paragraph to 30 pt.
Select the body of the letter. This starts with I am
exceedingly and ends with your consideration.
Change the line spacing to 1.15.
