Formatting Paragraph in MS Words 2003 (Answered)

Vemy Paw

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There is an automatic setting in MS Words that whenever a paragraph reaches the end of a page and there is one line separated from the other in the next page, then MS Words will automatically pull another line from above so that there will never be a lone line from a paragraph at the first or the last line of a page.

This is not a big deal when it's single spaced, but when I have to use double space, and the document is a formal document that have to follow certain margin rules, this becomes annoying as the pulled line will leave empty space at the end of the page above it.

I found that this is not a problem with .doc files generated from Scrivener, and it won't become a problem even if I copy and paste the paragraph into a new file generated from MS Words.

So what's different? Is there a hidden setting somewhere in the paragraph in MS Words that disallow one line to be separated from the other? If there is, I'd like to know how to get rid of that setting.

Any help is appreciated. Thank you.
 
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Al Stevens

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The feature you refer to is known as widows and orphans. You need to turn off Widow/Orphan control for paragraphs within the style you use in your document. And you need to save that change in the document template.

If you use multiple paragraph styles, you'll have to do this for each style.
  1. Click on a paragraph in the document
  2. Choose Format/Styles and Formatting...
  3. Right-click the top data entry field in the Styles and Formatting pane. This field contains the name of the style for the selected paragraph.
  4. Choose Modify...
  5. In the Modify Style dialog:
    1. Select the Add to template checkbox
    2. Choose Format/Paragraph
    3. Choose Line and Page Breaks
    4. Turn off the Widow/Orphan control checkbox
    5. Click OK
    6. Click OK
  6. The next time you save your document, Word asks if you want to save changes to the document template. Click Yes.
Versions of Word other than 2002, which I use, might have a slightly different sequence of commands.
 

Vemy Paw

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Oh, I see!
Thank you Al Stevens, my paragraphs look nice now!