For this week’s Roundup: several reasons you might not want to employ Microsoft Word’s Track Changes feature the next time you redline a document, getting under the hood with Word Options (even if you’re not a techie), another way to save Outlook email as a pdf (in case you want to take it with you on your iPad or other mobile device), and one possible reason your line spacing changes won’t stick in Word (a problem several of you have reported to me). Let’s get it started:
line spacing
Now that it’s past the annual holiday season here in the US (Santa brought me a way-big monitor!) it’s back in the saddle again for the Weekly Roundup. This week: Microsoft Office blog does its own list of most popular posts (including a couple of issues that continually plague legal Office users), a quick-and-dirty Excel tutorial on printing title rows, and an exciting rumor for iPad users.
If you’ve upgraded to one of the ribbon-interface versions of Microsoft Office recently, you may have noticed that every new document you create (as opposed to editing or making new documents from earlier ones) has this weird, more open line spacing.
What’s the story?
Well, it seems that Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, decided that since we’re all posting documents on the Interwebs, we could all do with a more online-friendly line spacing scheme. So they made line spacing in the Normal template 1.15 instead of 1. By default.
The default paragraph settings for Word 2010
Um … no.
If you want to change the default back to that single line spacing that looks good on paper, then here’s what you do:
- On the home tab of the ribbon, find the Styles section (on the right). You’ll see a drop-down called Change Styles. Click it, then choose Style Set, then click on Word 2003 (which will change the default styles for that document to the ones where Normal paragraphs have single spacing with no extra space after paragraphs.
- To make this change effective for all new documents based on the Normal template, drop this menu down again, and choose Set as Default.
- Now, when you review your Paragraph dialog box, you’ll see this:
Ah! That's better!
Hat tip to the Microsoft Office Knowledge Base for this one.
Have you ever had a document that you had to get all on one page, but there seemed to be just a little too much text to make that happen?
I assume you’ve already tried reducing the font size or making the page margins smaller. But have you tried any of the following?
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