Picture this: you’ve come to the end of a heading or paragraph in Microsoft Word, and you want to create a space before the next segment of text. It might be tempting to press Enter twice. Instead, you should adjust the paragraph’s Spacing After setting. Here’s why.
First, Show Non-Printing Characters
Before considering how your paragraphs are spaced, you should always display Word’s non-printing characters. This will make seeing the formatting and spacing in your document much easier, helping you to ensure consistency and formatting accuracy.
To do this, open the “Home” tab on the ribbon, and click the “¶” icon in the Paragraph group.
Now, anytime you press Space, Enter, or Tab, a marker will appear on your page. As their name suggests, non-printing characters do not show when you print your document—they exist purely to show you your document’s skeletal structure.
Why Pressing Enter Twice Can Cause Issues
Depending on your default paragraph settings, when you press Enter, you might find that Word moves your cursor to the next line immediately underneath the previous text you typed without adding a space.
In this example, the heading and two paragraphs appear squashed together, making the text difficult to read.
One way to create an extra space between the headings and paragraphs is to do so manually by pressing Enter.
While this successfully creates the desirable white space, using this method comes with several issues:
- If you format your fonts directly, the spaces after headings (with a larger font) and paragraphs (with a smaller font) may be inconsistently sized.
- Similarly, if you wanted to change the sizes of the spaces between paragraphs and headings, you would have to do this manually, and this could take a long time in a lengthy document.
- The extra space you add manually may end up at the top of a page, meaning the text doesn’t align with the upper margin.
- If you increase all the font sizes throughout your document, the manual spaces will also increase, leading to unusually large gaps between paragraphs.
To avoid these problems, change the paragraph settings to create the space automatically.
Change the Paragraph Style Settings Instead
You can force Microsoft Word to create those spaces automatically, saving you from having to worry about the issues listed above. While you can do this manually for each paragraph or heading, the best bet is to modify the styles.
Place your cursor in any of the main body paragraphs in your document. Before you change any settings, make sure the Normal style is applied to this text by viewing the Style Gallery in the Home tab on the ribbon. This should be the case by default, but it’s important to check first.
Once you’ve confirmed this is the case, right-click the Normal style in the Style Gallery, or use the Microsoft Word keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+S. Whichever route you choose, click “Modify.”
Now, click the “Format” drop-down menu at the bottom of the Modify Style dialog box, and select “Paragraph.”
Then, in the Indents And Spacing tab of the Paragraph dialog box, click the “up” arrow of the Spacing After option. Ideally, the space you create is the same height as the Normal style font. So, if your body text is 12 pt, increase the Spacing After to 12 pt also. While you’re there, make sure the Spacing Before option is set to 0 pt, and the “Don’t Add Space…” checkbox is unchecked.
When you click “OK” to close the two dialog boxes, you’ll see the desired white space added automatically after each of your existing Normal-style paragraphs, as well as after any that you add subsequently.
Since the Normal style dictates many of the properties for the other styles in your Word document, you might find that they adopt the 12 pt Spacing After automatically. In my example, a 12-pt-sized space has already been added to my Heading style without me having to change this setting myself.
However, if this doesn’t happen automatically, simply repeat the above process for each style in the Style Gallery you intend to use in your document. Even if your heading font size is larger than your Normal style font size, aim for consistency by setting the same Spacing After for each style.
Here are the benefits of using this method instead of adding the spaces manually:
- One of your primary focuses when formatting a document should be consistency, and using the Spacing After tool ensures you achieve this.
- You won’t end up with extra spaces at the top of a page—if the end of a paragraph is at the end of a page, Word automatically overrides this setting with the natural page break.
- You can easily increase or decrease all the spaces between each segment of text by modifying the styles, rather than having to adjust the layout after each paragraph manually.
- Even if you increase your font sizes, the sizes of the spaces after each paragraph will retain the properties you applied. This helps you avoid having extra-large spaces between each paragraph.
As well as using Word’s style settings to adjust the spaces after your paragraphs, use them to maintain consistency with font sizes, bullet numbering, tab indentations, and many other formatting properties you want to apply.
