Yet Another Irritating Word '07 Problem

There are lots of possible reasons for this.

A quick tip to see what formatting is applied to your paragraph/word is to place your cursor on the paragraph/word in question and then press Shift-F1.

A panel will appear on the right side showing what format is currently applied to that paragraph/word. [Some expandable sections over there, and some check boxes down the bottom to view even more info.]

Some formatting it doesn't seem to show, unfortunately. You could, for instance, have inadvertently applied space before/after to your paragraphs. That can be removed in the paragraph formatting panel. [Click the tiny arrow to the right of the word Paragraph on the Home tab.]

As for the exact number of lines per page question, I would usually adjust my margins to control that. [Ie. Set the font to whatever I want it to be, then adjust the margins so that only the requisite number of lines would fit. Page breaks I would not use, because then I'd have to go remove them.]

My first thought is that Word 07 likes to default to 6-12 pts added on every paragraph.

You can find that in Home-->Paragraph-->Spacing on the left side. Make certain everything's set to 0 inset of AUTO.

Try:

Format/paragraph/Indents and Spacing

Make sure you have a "0" in the Before: and After: boxes.

Good luck!

This happened to me not long ago. I ended up de-selecting a radio button in a text box that said something like: Add extra line after paragraph.

Unfortunately, I can't find anything that looks like it now, and don't remember exactly where I found it. Perhaps it only appears when in use, though that doens't make sense to me.

Good Luck. 2007 is driving me nuts.

Yep! Open is pretty good.

I wonder if there are compatibility issues. Hmm.

Your trouble may be that you have conflicting paragraph styles, or that you aren't making use of this very powerful formatting feature of MS Word. The best way to ensure things work in MS Word as you desire is to define paragraph styles.

"Normal" is the default paragraph style and can't be deleted. It may not appear as you want when you open a new document and begin typing. Rather than just changing the font, spacing, etc using the "Format-Font" or "Format-Paragraph" in the main menu, click on "Format-Styles and Formatting."

You'll get a sidebar menu with a display of the paragraph styles (and character styles if any are defined). To the right of the style name is a paragraph mark (¶). If you click on that you get a pop-up dialog from which you can select "Modify".

Once you've modified the paragraph style, all paragraphs using that style will conform to your changes. Doing this solves a lot of formatting problems so that you don't have to worry about formatting while writing.

For example, I modify Normal style to Times Roman, single spaced, left justified, 1/2" indent, 6 points between paragraphs. I find this easier to use while composing. But when I wish to submit a manuscript, I modify Normal to Courier, double spaced, left justified, 1/2" indent, 0 points between paragraphs.

Similarly, I can define a character style for Italic that is in fact italicized on the screen, but when going to manuscript, I change the Italic character style to be normal font, but underlined.

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PS
If on the modify paragraph dialog, you check the "add to template" box, your changes will be in effect for all new documents and you won't need to do the above each time you begin a new document.

Sheila Muirenn said:

Yep! Open is pretty good.

I wonder if there are compatibility issues. Hmm.

Click to expand...

I haven't had any problems yet, and I've had OpenOffice for about a month now. I still have Word 2007 on one computer (every ms. saved in ".doc" though, not ."docx") and OO on the other (every ms. again saved in ".doc"). I've used a USB to transfer the files from one computer to the other, and even sent emails with mss. No problems.

I like OpenOffice. Easy downloading it too.

Lost World said:

That's the ticket, problem solved! I opened up a new document as well to test the theory of whether this has to be done on every new document. Unfortunately, yes.

Thank you!

Click to expand...

You won't need to do it in every new document if you modify the style.

To modify the style, right-click on the Normal style in the style selection boxes on the Home tab, and select modify. [Presuming it is the normal style you're having issues with, which you probably are.]

Change the option down the bottom from "Only in this document" to "New documents based on this template" and then click the format menu button and select paragraph.

Remove the space after from the style and click okay.

Close Word. It will automatically save changes to the style.

You should now have your documents defaulting to no space after, regardless of whether that box is checked.

While you're at it, you might want to set your other style standards for Normal, such as font, etc.

If you normally work without spaces, then 'Normal' should be the one you're modifying.

The no spacing style strikes me as completely unnecessary. [One of the first things I did was delete most of the built-in styles off the styles toolbar. I'd rather have styles that I would use taking up all that space.]