Beware of Default Spacing

Suddenly everyone in the office has weird and uneven spacing in their memos and bulletin board postings. I figured out that at some point Word put in a default line spacing that left everyone feeling miffed. 

"Yes, I know it looks funny, but that's the way it turned out."

Beware default spacing. As of this writing, Word's default line spacing is 1.15 and its font size is 11. Worst of all, the "Spacing After" (found from the Page Layout tab) is 10. Most of the time, IMHO, this makes lists look bad and instructions difficult to read. 

Whenever you start a document, make sure the line spacing is what you want (I recommend starting at 1, or single spacing, and then changing it later if you need to.), and make sure the "Spacing After" is set at 0. From there you can build your document and format it when it's done, making it exactly the way you want it.

(c)2014 Suzann Kale

Tags: Word, formatting, technical writing, business writing, spacing