- [Instructor] Setting the line spacing on your paragraphs
can be very important.
Do you want single spacing, double spacing
or something in between.
Now first it's going to make this much easier
if I turn on the non printing characters.
So in the home ribbon,
I'll click the button for non printing characters
so I can easily see where one paragraph ends
and another begins.
And now I can see the extra space
between these first few lines
are there because there are extra paragraph breaks.
These lines are not double-spaced.
So let's remove those extra paragraph breaks.
I'll just place my cursor there and hit the Delete key.
And again, here and here.
Now for the moment
that might make it a little harder to read,
but what it does is it gives us a better starting point
to format this properly.
Now, of course you can select text in a paragraph,
or you can just click to place your cursor
somewhere inside of a paragraph,
but I want to actually apply some formatting
to multiple paragraphs at the same time.
So I do want to actually drag to select these two paragraphs,
and I'm going to set these two double-space.
To do that, we'll go to the home ribbon,
then I'll go to this menu here
and to set it for double spacing,
I'll choose the option for 2.0.
Click on that
and now those two paragraphs are double-spaced.
Now the end result might look basically the same,
but the formatting here is much cleaner
and I want to scroll down in my document
and do the same thing to this line right here.
Delete these unnecessary paragraph breaks,
place my cursor on that paragraph,
and I'm going to switch it to double spaced.
And don't worry
if you feel like there should be some extra space
before this line, just bear with me for a moment.
Next, I want to change the spacing
on the other text in my document.
So scrolling up near the top here,
I just want to select a large chunk of the basic body text
all the way down to about here.
And I'm going to go to that same spacing menu.
Now, I don't want this to be single-spaced
and I don't want to go all the way up to double space.
I want to choose an option in between.
I'm just going to choose 1.15.
And that just gives me a little bit more space
between the lines.
And let's do the same thing
to the last part of this document here.
We're going to switch that to 1.15.
So that's a little bit more comfortable,
but still our paragraphs are sort of running together.
So there's another line spacing feature I like to use,
but does not actually appear in the home ribbon.
To get to it, we need to start by selecting our text.
And in this case,
I really want to select everything in my document.
So I'll drag all the way down to select everything.
Now, if you're using windows,
you can go to the home ribbon to the paragraph section
and you can click this button
in the bottom right corner of the paragraph section
and that opens this panel
that gives you even more paragraph formatting options.
For now, I'm going to cancel this
because there's another way to get to it
and this will work on both Mac and Windows.
You can select the text, then right click on that text
and choose Paragraph.
So if you're using a Mac,
that's the way you're going to need to get to this panel.
And from here, I want to look at my spacing options.
Now, right now, the field for line spacing is empty
and that's because I have different spacing
for different paragraphs in the text that I have selected.
And that is totally fine.
But if I make a change here in this menu,
it will be applied to everything I have selected.
And I do not want to do that.
Instead, I want to look at the values over here
for space before and after.
And this lets you add a little space before
or after every paragraph you have selected.
So I'm actually going to add 10 points of space
after my paragraphs,
and that will be applied to all of the texts
that I have currently selected.
So I'll change that and I'll click, OK.
And now look at that.
We've got some nice padding
in between each paragraph in my document,
and we're not using extra unnecessary paragraph breaks
in between each one.
So the formatting here is much cleaner.
And at this point, if you want,
you can go back to the home ribbon,
turn off your non printing characters
so you can see the document normally.
And this is the right way to set spacing
between lines and paragraphs in your document.