How to change line height, lines spacing and space after in Microsoft Word 2016
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
In this tutorial we're going to look at adjusting your line height, and something called the space after. We're going to transform it from this, from the last tutorial where there's a big giant gap underneath there, and the type is a bit too close together, to-- Ready? Where that tucks up underneath, there's a bit more space in between the paragraphs. So, line height, space after, let's go and learn that.
Let's look at line height versus the space after. Line height is the space between lines, and the space after is this space between paragraphs. So if you want to open this up, which I do, the body copy here, this means-- I want the space between the lines to open up. Go to 'Home', and along here, there's an option. Looks like that little icon, drop it down, you can hover above, '1.0' you might want to turn it up, you can keep progressively getting bigger and bigger.
I want mine to be about '1.5', looks nice. '1.5' for the line height, but it hasn't adjusted this space between paragraphs. I feel that there needs to be more space here now. That is called the space after, so I'm going to select all of this again, and I go back up to that same option. There's two things I can do-- say you don't like this space, you're using double returns between paragraphs, but you got this kind of extra junk in here. So what you might want to do is, you might want to remove it, and that's quite easy. In that same little option, there he is there, there's one that says 'Remove Space After', and you can see, if I hover above it, it removes it. It's cleared up down the bottom there. What I want to do is go to 'Line Spacing Options', and I want to play around-- see, the default is set to '8 pt', that is the gap between these two. I want to make mine bigger, I want to make mine, say '15', click 'OK', and I've got a bigger space between them, so that is how to adjust the space after.
We're going to learn to add something to our menu along the top here, so, what I'd like to do is-- I'm always playing around with the spacing. You could see, by default, this heading here has a big gap underneath, so what I want to do is, with this selected-- I might be on one of these other ones, but I use space after so much that I want to add it to the default, so I can do that by grabbing this guy here, I can right click him, and say, 'Add to Quick Access Toolbar'. And where does he appear? It appears up here. Means that it could be any of these, and still get to my line space after, it's one of the things that I do, maybe I'm a font nerd. If you're a font nerd too, you can add--
You can add anything up there. Say you're playing around with any of the set sizings, you can right click and say 'Add To Access Bar', and it can be up there all the time.
I'm going to go in here, and by default it's '8 pt', I want to put mine done to '0', actually after this, and you can start playing around with all these different adjustments. What I want to do for this, is I want to do the same thing, the line spacing I want to increase him up. This is just me playing around now, making things look nice.