I'm a preacher, I have to put a bulletin together every Sunday. Every now and then I have to create a lot more space for bulletin items because we do the Lord's supper. The catch is that I can't exceed a certain page limit because we print them back and front. If I exceed the limit, it would require a bulletin insert.



In order to create more space, I find myself finding each and every blank line (which is really a paragraph or carriage return) and shrinking the size of the "font" manually. This decreases the amount of vertical space taken up by the blank line, thereby increasing the amount of space I have to work with.

Is there a way to change ALL the carriage returns to a smaller font size automatically and simultaneously?

Thanks in advance for the help...

Hi revrossreddick,

You really shouldn't be inserting empty paragraphs to achieve the desired spacing.

What you should be doing is using different paragraph Styles (eg one for headings, another for body text, another for bullets) that provide a pre-defined amount of space before & after each paragraph of a given Style (eg 6pt before & after for a normal paragraph, 6pt after for a bullteded paragraph), as well as the font type & size (+ italics, bold etc), the amount of indenting, left & right margins and the line spacing within each paragraph (you might prefer single line spacing instead of Word's default 1.15 lines).

Then, if you need to adjust the spacing to make the content take more, or less, room, simply modifying the Styles will update all paragraphs of that Style consistently.

FWIW, you can change just the paragrapgh breaks, via Find/Replace, where:
Find = ^p
Replace = ^&
and you set the replacement point size to whatever you want.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

This is helpful! I'll just have to take the time to really think through and create a custom paragraph style with all the specifications I need (probably one style for "normal" sundays, one styles for "busier" sundays). Many thanks!