Where do they hide the capacity to change spacing (between lines) in Windows 10? It’s very frustrating to search through “Insert” “Design” “Layout” etc. and not find this basic function.
You mean in Word? What should work is to highlight the text you want to double-space, right-click, and select “paragraph”. That will open a menu that lets you select line spacing.
Thank you. Yes, I meant Word. Jesus Christ, is there anything LESS intuitive than highlighting and right-clicking??? Even the menu you point me to doesn’t make it easy to find the spacing options.
The default style (“Normal”) is single-space, with 8 pt after each paragraph. You can always save a new style or modify that one.
The button for paragraph spacing is:
Home menu
Paragraph section
Bottom line in the middle, between the alignment buttons and the shading button. Four horizontal lines with up and down arrows.
No need to right-click anything.
Thanks again. I wonder what genius decided that “spacing” in an entire document belonged under paragraph (hidden in the “home” menu) rather than “design”?
Maybe because it’s not uncommon to desire different spacing, and perhaps margins or font, in different paragraphs.
Often done when writing instruction manuals.
“Home” because that’s where they stashed all the frequently used functions. Styles are typically applied to paragraphs, not entire documents, unless you’re going for a typewriter look and feel. But if you change the spacing before you start typing, it will apply to the entire document.
And spacing has been under some sort of paragraph menu since at least the late 90s. This isn’t something new.
You think that’s bad - try finding the place to change the slide size to letter paper in Powerpoint. Equally untuititve.
As with anything computer, asking Google is your friend. Microsoft taketh, Google giveth. I suppose with each iteration of whatever, the designers don’t feel they’ve done their job until they’ve changed a decent amount of stuff. I used to tell people about Microsoft - “If something is essential, or even just convenient, Microsoft will either delete it or hide it in the next version of Windows or Office.”
I guess this is one of those instances where opinions differ hugely as to what is convenient. I, personally, find it very intuitive: Whenever I want to do something about text that I’ve typed, I highlight it and right-click. That will open menus that should let me choose what I want to do with the highlighted bit. It might still be cumbersome to find it in the menu (in this case, as you point out, its necessary to make the association between “paragraphs” and line spacing), but the highlighting/right-clicking part is, to me, self-suggesting.
But then again, there’s no accounting for tastes, and as always in MS Office, there are many different paths to the same outcome. You can, for instance, also highlight the text and (left-)click the little expansion arrow in the corner of the “paragraph” section of the “home” menu. Or you define a style the way @Ruken suggested, and apply that style to the text you wrote.
A problem that MSFT faces is that a tool like Word or Excel has about 10,000 buttons and features. Experts use most of those. But many office workers and most home users can barely turn it on and type into it.
How to make it simple enough for the totally untrained casual user and still be a good enough tool to author highly complex documents is a tall order.
Whenever MSFT has released a kinder, gentler, simpler word processor, people turn their noses up at at it and it dies an expensive death.
IME Google Docs is no better; highly powerful tools can’t be made “intuitive” because there’s actually a huge range of intuition. What they can be made, is logically consistent. Which affords some chance for a dedicated learning-oriented user to pick up on that consistency and develop self-reinforcing increasing skill.
Word & Excel are highly logically consistent.
Learn about how to use Styles. If you have set your document up properly it is trivial to update a style so that the formatting of your entire document can be updated in a couple of clicks.
I used to work for an employer that used (then) Lotus Notes for e-mailing, user directories, and calendar. It was hugely non-intuitive (up to the point that writing an e-mail required you to click a button labelled “Create memo”). It was also notorius for making the F keys do things entirely different from what they do in pretty much all of Windows. Compared to that darkness, MS Office feels to me like a kingdom of light.