Microsoft Word will apply your change of line spacing to the current block of text (where your insertion point is blinking) - a paragraph in our example if you want to change the line spacing setting for multiple paragraphs or the entire document, start by selecting the targeted text.As soon as you do, you will have three generic paragraphs on which to test various line spacing settings. Once you have the blank document opened in front of you, type ' =rand()' and hit Enter: this is a special command in Microsoft Word that allows you to generate random text for testing purposes. If needed, start by opening a blank document in Word 2010 (press the Ctrl+N keyboard shortcut if you have another document opened, we'll try out line spacing options on a test document).

In Word 2003, however, the defaults were 1.0 line spacing, and no default spacing after each paragraph (more 'compact'). The paragraph you are reading right now has a line spacing of 1.3 - 30% of the line height is taken by white space, which helps long paragraphs 'breath', and become a bit more friendly to readers' eyes! In this tutorial, we will show you how to change the line spacing as multiples of the current font size, or set it to a fixed unit - and which solution is typically best, and for which purpose.įYI: in Word 2010 and Word 2007, the default line spacing is 1.15, with a default paragraph spacing of 10 points after.

This measures the total height of the line, including space above and below the previous and next lines (this works in conjunction with ' paragraph spacing', for example, which controls how much white space appears before and after each paragraph). Whenever you type some text in a Word 2010 document, it will by default have a ' 1.15' line spacing value (also known as ' line height'), which means that 1.15 times the current font size will be used to display a line of text: the smaller the multiple (minimum being 1), the more 'tight' your text looks.

Paragraph spacing in word 2007