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Word 2010 Videos - Line Spacing

Line spacing in Word refers to the space between lines and the space between paragraphs in your document. Just the right amount of space can increase the readability of your document, so it's important to get it right. You'll probably find that the default spacing in Word is good for most documents, but you need to know how to change it when necessary.

We'll first look at controlling line spacing using the Line and Paragraph Spacing command. So, first of all, let's select this paragraph. Here's that command, click on that. It immediately shows us what the current line spacing is set to. It's currently set to 1.15 and that's the default line spacing in Word 2010.

Also, we can change it to 1 - and as you can see, it's looking a little cramped - 1.5, 2, and the spacing is gradually getting bigger and bigger.

That was line spacing, but let's move on to paragraph spacing now. When you press Enter to start a new paragraph, Word automatically puts space in between the old and the new paragraphs. We can demonstrate that by breaking up this existing paragraph, by placing the cursor here, and then pressing Enter. Now, you can see that there's a space in between the old paragraph and the new one.

To change the paragraph spacing at a basic level, we can use the options on the line and paragraph spacing command, like we saw before. We'll just select those two paragraphs, go back in and down here you can see the Add Space Before Paragraph and the Remove Space After Paragraph commands. Hovering over each of those options gives us a live preview, so we can see what each does.

That command gave us a basic level of control, but, if we want a little more control, we can go back into that command, and this time choose Line Spacing Options. On this side are the paragraph spacing options, and on this side are the line spacing options. Now, just to demonstrate, let's change the spacing before the paragraph to be 20pt and the spacing after the paragraph to be 40pt. And we'll just click OK, now.

OK, we'll ctrl+z to undo that.