Project 3: Brochure
Paragraph Dialog

A number of useful effects can be created by adjusting the spacing and indention of paragraphs. The white space you create can help set certain paragraphs off from the rest of the document.

The Paragraph dialog, found on the Format menu and on the right click popup menu, contains settings for a number of paragraph characteristics.

Alignment

At the top, the Alignment drop list lets you select Left, Centered, Right, and Justified. If that is all you want to do, the toolbar buttons for these settings are faster. But other changes can only be made in this dialog.

Outline level:  You can assign an outline level to the current paragraph, regardless of its paragraph style. Before Word 97, only heading styles were recognized by the Outline view. A heading style carries your formatting choices with it. So, once you defined a heading style, you were stuck with that style for all paragraphs at that outline level. Awkward.

Indention

In the Indention section you set the distance for left and right indents. These add white space beside your text. An indent applies to a whole paragraph.

The  Special box can be set for  First line (which has white space at the front of the first line, but not in front of other lines in the paragraph) or Hanging indent (which has white space in front of the lines after the first line, but not the first).

Spacing

Under Spacing you can set the white space before, after, and within a paragraph. The first example shows 10 points of white space before and after the paragraph. The lines inside the paragraph are single spaced.

Many people are used to using blank lines to create such white space before or after a paragraph. That does work, of course. But it is awkward to adjust the spacing to something different from the standard line height. Plus, you must do this separately for every paragraph. By making the spacing of the paragraph a part of the styling of the paragraph itself, you can save yourself many steps. The Body Text paragraph style that is part of many templates includes spacing around a paragraph like this.

The second example changed the single line spacing to double spacing.

The third example has the line spacing set to a specific number of points. You have very precise control of line spacing with this dialog!

~~  1 Cor. 10:31 ...whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.  ~~

Last updated: 30 Apr 2012