In MS Word paragraph formatting in Excel, you can have consistent space above and below a text paragraph. Can you do the same in Excel in a cell or all cells in a worksheet?

You can, within a Text Box (Insert Text Box). Inside the text box, right mouse click and find Paragraph, where it has alignment, indentation, and spacing settings similar to Word.

Or, you can insert a Word document into an Excel sheet (Insert, Object, Microsoft Word Document). When you're inside that embedded Word doc you would have full Word ribbon at the top.

But, for generally typing in cells, not really. Unless someone here knows of something I haven't tried.