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Word 2007: Styles with ridiculous spacing

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JavaJones:
Nice, thanks Andy. :)

- Oshyan

AndyM:
... whereas any that I've ever done using leading/trailing space often less consistent and more jarring differences in spacing throughout, making them more annoying to read IMO.
-JavaJones (February 19, 2010, 06:19 PM)
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Using styles gives you the best of both worlds, if you design your styles to work in a standard way.  I don't often have to mess with the before & after settings.  I use the tools for cleanup including the sort superboyac was talking about, for exeptions like spacing the signature lines at the end of a document, or for setup and design (when I get it how I like it, I update the style to match).

Using empty paragraphs (that's what you mean by newlines, right?) makes it impossible to use a very handy function of styles, which is to set the style of the paragraph following (you can always force a repeat of the current style in the next paragraph if you hit Enter just before the last character in the paragraph, like a space).  Useful capability when doing outlines and lists and some other things, adds consistency, and in some cases can save much time.

J-Mac:
I tried to create an outline the other day - doesn’t work with Roman numerals. The first line gets an "I", and then it boots you out of outline format! Searching around I find out that you have to create a style for this. Bunch of BS!!

Jim

edbro:
When you see all that white space, is it multiple empty paragraphs?
If so, a macro that will, in a selection, replace two endPara marks with one, run repeatedly until there are no empty paragraphs will be handy.  This will take care of excessive space due to multiple Returns and also double spacing from double Returns.

If the white space is because of Word's Space Before and Space After settings (the proper way to construct a Word doc as it's poor form to use empty paragraphs for spacing), then you can automate editing those settings (hotkeys, right click, buttons, etc. with macros assigned to add/sub 2 or 8 pts before/after and/or specific settings like zero pts b4 or 4 pts after) depending on your needs and typical approach.
-AndyM (February 19, 2010, 12:07 PM)
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You don't really need macros to do this. Set one paragraph the way you like it then right click on the style and choose Update to Match Selection. That will change/update everything with that style. If you update it in normal.dot then it will be that way forever.

AndyM:
Set one paragraph the way you like it then right click on the style and choose Update to Match Selection.
-edbro (February 26, 2010, 07:54 PM)
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The tools are to make setting it the way I like quick and efficient, otherwise it's too many clicks/keys to change space b4/after.  Once I like it, I update the style to match.  Like I said, I seldom have to mess with these settings.  New designs and cleaning up imported text are when it comes up.   

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