- Hi there.
If you're struggling to work out
why your text in Word has big gaps between your paragraphs,
let's see if I can give you a hand to sort this out.
(light music)
Hey, I'm Sharyn from Excel at Work,
where we offer straightforward, non-technical assistance
to help you become a confident,
super productive user of Microsoft Office.
Now, in this video I'm going to run through
why this may be happening to you in your document.
I've helped so many people become super proficient users
of Word, and I know that this one thing in Word
has totally frustrated a lot of people,
so I'll show you how to control spacing
in just one document,
and then I'll show you how to change the settings
so that every new document you create
will have the spacing set just how you want it.
So if this tip helps you out,
please dive into the comments below, and let me know.
Okay, so let's see if I can help you out
with your paragraph spacing, and line spacing.
So here we are in Word,
and I'm in a brand new file, or a new document,
and this might be you.
You might have just started a brand new file,
and found that as you started
to enter information into it,
you got gaps, and that's not helpful.
So let's have a look at how we can work through this.
Okay, I'll just pop some information
onto the screen to start off with.
So I'm just gonna use a wee little trick
that Microsoft have given us to help out.
What we can do here is just pop that little function in,
hit Enter, and look at that.
It actually gives you three paragraphs
with a 12 lines in it.
So we can see that we've now got a decent amount
of information in there,
and I didn't have to type it, which is fabulous.
Okay, there we go.
You can see that between each one of our lines,
we've got spacing,
and between each one of our paragraphs,
we've got spacing as well.
So, let's just go and have a look at what's going on.
So I'm just gonna select both of these paragraphs here.
In fact, just wanna show you a really quick way,
did you know you can actually just go
out to the side here, and drag down?
Nice, and quick, and easy.
Okay, so we're gonna make our way
through to the paragraph dialog box.
Now you can get to it very quickly,
just by clicking on the dialog box launcher here.
Or, if you've been doing it this way,
right hand mouse click, and then making your way
down to Paragraph here, same diff.
It's fine, you can just easily get to it both ways.
Right.
I'll just move this out of the way,
so we can see what's going on.
Here we go, here is the setting
that's controlling the spacing after each paragraph.
You can see by default,
Word is giving us a 10 point spacing
after or between each paragraph.
Every time you hit Enter,
that's what you're going to get.
So we can set that back to zero.
By the way, six point there,
with the settings that I've got at the moment,
will be about half a line.
So I'm gonna take it right back to no spacing between.
Now over here, you can see the spacing between each line,
so you can actually see why we've got that gap going on
between each line.
Now, that is great if you're actually wanting
to have spacing between your lines.
You know, sometimes when you're editing,
you want to just put little notes between it,
but not great if you haven't got a clue what's going on,
and you are after single spacing.
So selecting it back to Single,
now when we click onto OK,
let's have a look at what happens.
Look at that.
So now you've actually got your single spacing again,
and you've got no spacing between paragraphs.
Now sometimes you do actually want to have spacing
between your paragraphs,
and of course you could whip back in there very quickly,
maybe put a half a point,
or sorry, half a line, or a full line,
and click on OK, and look,
Excel will actually do the spacing for you.
So sometimes that's absolutely fabulous,
and what you're wanting.
And by the way, you can also,
if I just make my way to the Layout tab,
you can control it here as well.
So if I just come down a little bit further down here,
and I might just actually just highlight over here,
you can see we've actually got two different settings
in there, hence the reason Microsoft Word's not showing us
what's going on, but I could actually take it down
to zero spacing here, or I could take it up as well,
and just control the spacing.
Sadly not the line spacing,
but definitely the paragraph spacing if we needed to.
So that my friends is how
you can quickly reset your paragraph spacing,
and your line spacing.
Now you're probably thinking,
ooh, well if I change that,
will that change every document?
No, it will just change the document
that you're currently in.
However, if you're finding
that every time you start a new document,
you're having to make your way up here,
and make these changes,
you can also change your default setting down here.
So what I would suggest you do,
is you actually make sure that you set your defaults
how you want them to be.
So I'll just select everything there.
By the way, you can use a Control-A as well.
So I'm just pressing Control and A on the keyboard,
and that selects my whole document.
Make my way back into the Paragraph settings,
set them how I want them to be.
Make that zero.
And over here I want that to be single.
Now down here, I can go Set As Default.
Now I'll just bring this over here.
So if we read this,
do you want to set the default alignment,
indentation, and spacing of the paragraphs
for this document only,
or all documents based on the Normal template,
which means that every new document you create
from this point forward,
will have those settings on it.
And of course you can go ahead and click onto OK.
I won't for mine, I'm gonna leave it,
but you could click onto OK,
and just know then that your settings are all predetermined
by you instead of Word.
So I'm just gonna cancel out of here.
Now the other thing to just clarify for you as well
is it will not go back and affect any documents
that you have actually created
prior to you changing those settings.
It will only be setup for any new document,
so when you're going File, New,
so if you're actually going File, New up here,
you can also use Control-N for New,
to start a new document as well,
and of course if we actually set those defaults,
you're ready to go, you're good to go.
So I hope that's helped.
And you're now good as gold,
and you're actually working in a document
that has the settings that you require.
I really hope this has been helpful,
so please let me know in the comments below
if it fixed your problem,
and if you use Word and wanted to stay connected,
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Hey thanks for watching, and have a fabulous day.