Spacing options in Word 2011 as difficult to access and use as they are in PowerPoint. I personally can no longer live with such a modal approach for accessing paragraph formatting options, and I certainly am not willing to give up on doing things properly myself just because Microsoft’s engineers.
The default line spacing in Word is 1.15. By default, paragraphs are followed by a blank line and headings have a space above them. Here’s how to change the default settings. On the Home tab, click Line and Paragraph Spacing. Click Line Spacing Options at the bottom of the menu, and then select the options you want in the Paragraph dialog box under Spacing. If you want to change the spacing before or after the selected paragraphs, click the arrow next to Before or After and enter the amount of space that you want.
You can control how much space appears between lines of text in a paragraph or throughout your document. Click to place the insertion point in the paragraph you want to adjust, or drag to select multiple paragraphs. In the Format on the right, below Spacing, click the pop-up menu and choose an option:. Lines: The distance between ascenders (parts of letters that extend to the top of the line) and descenders (parts of letters that extend below the line) stays the same. The space between lines is proportional to the font size. At least: The distance between lines stays fixed (but lines don’t overlap if the text gets large).
The distance from one line to the next will never be less than the value you set, but it may be larger for larger fonts to prevent overlapping text lines. Exactly: The value sets the precise distance between text baselines, which may result in some overlap. Between: The value you set increases the space between the lines, instead of increasing the height of the lines.
By contrast, double-spacing doubles the height of each line. Click the arrows next to the spacing field to set the amount of space for the option you chose.
To adjust the amount of space before and after the selected paragraph, click the arrows for Before Paragraph and After Paragraph.