Primarily utilized for digital writing and document-oriented tasks, it’s no surprise users of Microsoft Word run into paragraphs so frequently. In some cases, however, you may find your paragraphs’ spacing far too small or perhaps awkwardly spacious. Fortunately for both of us, the unfortunate values causing this unsightly occurrence are not immutable.
Solution:
- Navigate to the home tab
- Click “line and paragraph spacing” dropdown in the paragraph section
- Choose a preset spacing option
- You can also select “Line Spacing Options” for more advanced configurations
In this post, I’ll be guiding you on quickly adjusting your paragraph spacing, as well as discussing the more advanced configurations available to you (if you dislike the standard presets)- including changing spaces without affecting the whole document.
Contents:
- [1] How to change document-wide paragraph spacing
- [2] How to change document-wide line spacing
- [3] Change paragraph space size without affecting the rest of the document
- [4] Paragraph spacing versus line spacing
- [5] Recap & Farewell
How to change document-wide paragraph spacing
Step 1 – Open line and pargraph spacing dropdown in home tab
You can find the “Line and Paragraph spacing” dropdown under the “Home” tab- in the category labeled “Paragraph.” Open the dropdown by left-clicking the icon. It resembles a series of horizontal facing lines with vertical facing arrows to their left.
Step 2 – Select an option
You will find a series of numeric values within the dropdown denoting the whitespace between lines/paragraphs. If you’re not interested in the advanced options, I recommend skipping the remaining steps. Otherwise, select “Line Spacing Options” to continue.
- “Line Spacing Options…” – Access the advanced configurations options
- “Add Space Before Paragraph” – Inserts whitespace at the start of a paragraph
- “Remove space After Paragraph” – Removes the whitespace at the end of a paragraph
Step 3 – Configure paragraph spacing to your prefferences
Spacing options are in the “Indents and Spacing” tab under the “Spacing” category. While you may alter other options, we suggest tweaking around with the “After” box under “Spacing” to achieve your initial goal. High values will produce equally large paragraph spaces. In contrast, smaller values will have the opposite effect.
How to change document-wide line spacing
Step 1 – Open line and pargraph spacing dropdown in home tab
You can find the “Line and Paragraph spacing” dropdown under the “Home” tab- in the category labeled “Paragraph.” Open the dropdown by left-clicking the icon. It resembles a series of horizontal facing lines with vertical facing arrows to their left.
Step 2 – Select an option
You will find a series of numeric values within the dropdown denoting the whitespace between lines/paragraphs. If you’re not interested in the advanced options, I recommend skipping the remaining steps. Otherwise, select “Line Spacing Options” to continue.
- “Line Spacing Options…” – Access the advanced configurations options
- “Add Space Before Paragraph” – Inserts whitespace at the start of a paragraph
- “Remove space After Paragraph” – Removes the whitespace at the end of a paragraph
Step 3 – Configure line spacing to your preferrences
You can find “Line spacing” in the “Spacing” category under “Indents and Spacing.” Increasing the value will cause the space between lines to grow, similarly decreasing the value will shrink the space.
Change paragraph space size without affecting the rest of the document
Enjoy the simplicity
Fortunately, achieving this task is a lot easier than just changing everything. To begin, you’ll need to click anywhere in the paragraph you’d like to alter, then navigate to the “Layout” tab and find “Spacing” in the “Paragraph” section. Next, incrementally increase or decrease the “Before” and “After” values to achieve the desired result. You can do that by selecting the ascending and descending arrows suffixing each box.
Paragraph spacing versus line spacing
In the simplest form, a paragraph is recognizable as a block of text, while lines serve as the smaller pieces of the said block. Word allows us to create both as well as alter the spacing between multiple lines and paragraphs. Line spacing influences the size of the whitespace between two lines, while paragraph spacing influences the size of the whitespace above and below paragraphs.
Recap & Farewell
Recap
Word’s paragraph/line whitespace is a document property influenced by static yet mutable values. You can change these values to manipulate the whitespace document-wide or alter the spacing for a single localized paragraph. When altering document-wide properties, you must utilize the “Home” page’s paragraph menu while making changes to an individual paragraph is handled in the “Layout” channel.
Farewell
As always, I’d like to say thanks for reading along and supporting my work. If you have any Microsoft 365 queries or outstanding issues, I’d like to request you check out the rest of the site- where my colleagues and I work hard to post new content frequently.
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