Well, the circumstances are very complicated (I’ll post them if anybody really wants to know), but it turns out that I absolutely have to find out how to add LARGE spacing between paragraphs in MS Word 2010-- twice as large as they would normally be. All of the information I’ve found seems to be about how to DELETE that kind of spacing if it appears. If I can’t figure out how to do this, it’s basically going to be a disaster, with lots and lots of authors turning in normally spaced docs that will end up squished together. Some of the smart people on here must know how to do this!
Highlight paragraph (or select all, ctrl a)
Right click, select paragraph
Under Spacing, go to After. Normally it is 10 pt. Make it as big as you want.
If I wanted to lose whatever remained of my mind, I think that would be the way to go. Anyway, flight’s solution worked! Yay! Tiny bit of sanity retained!
Formatting in this way is a guaranteed way to annoy the hell out of anyone who ever has to work on the document after you.
See also inserting dozens of leading spaces and/or tabs to shove copy over to the right margin instead of selecting the “right align” option. Drives me mad.
If you’re writing a book, or a letter, and you want every paragraph to have the same amount of blank space after it, then I agree that yours is the way to go.
But I often work on graphics things where each page needs to have certain things on it, and in certain locations. That requires me to fine-tune the space between paragraphs A-B differently than paragraphs B-C. I certainly could use the Paragraph Formatting dialog box to make changes in the “Spacing After” section, but that is very tedious. I find it much easier to use “Spacing After = 0” for everything, and then have an empty paragraph between the two real paragraphs. This allows me to easily select the empty paragraph, and then make it larger or smaller by changing the font size. I can do this most easily with ctrl-[ or ctrl-], but even changing the font size in the toolbar is easier than going to the Paragraph Formatting dialog box.
In general, I prefer WYSIWYG over hiding the format info in sneaky places. So when I turn on the “show paragraph marks” (you know, that button with the left-facing “P”) I want it to show me as much as it can. With my procedure, I see that left-facing P for each empty paragraph, and its size corresponds to the empty space. But with your procedure, I have no way to know why these two paragraphs are so far apart, or so close together. It might be because of the “Spacing After” setting, but it could just as easily be the “Spacing Before” setting of the next paragraph.
(Colophon, I probably went into more detail than you personally needed to understand me. I did it for the benefit of other readers.)
You can do this and it will work - as long as you never, ever change anything in that document. If you do and you haven’t anchored the graphic, Word will throw up and move the graphic anywhere on the page, even to a preceding page on top of another graphic. Or possibly Mars.
Yeah, I totally hate that. That’s exactly why I almost never use the anchoring crap, always choosing “in line with text”, so that the graphics stay with the relevant text even after I make changes.
Always choose the right tool for the job. If the job is so graphic-intensive that so many pictures need to be positioned so very perfectly, then use Publisher or a more professional equivalent thereof. Word is primarily for text-based documents.
