Two most irritating things about Microsoft Word:
1) Using justify where the last sentence of the paragraph always looks awful; like when the last sentence has two words and are split left and right with white space in between.
I know you can put a paragraph mark but that doesn't work for me since in legal pleadings you don't want a space between paragraphs, you merely indent the first word to define new paragraphs. I tried the control-hyphen for a hidden spacer and this didn't work, it did not hide most of the time but if it did, in Print View the words meld together as one, for example "work-today" looks like "worktoday" and I want it to look like "work today"


2) Using centering. I center my titles and no matter what, the type above and below center as well. Again, I cannot use a paragraph hard return because I don't want spaces between lines, I indent the first word of each new paragraph which is used in legal pleading. Even if I do have spaces above and below, when I center a title sometimes lines above and below center, too.
UGH! These eat up my time so much!! I do not know Styles and perhaps that would help me but I confess I am looking for a 'trick'.
If styles would help, can you tell me how specifically, please! Thanks!

Note that you can set the spacing before and after so that they are both zero; that way, you can press Enter without getting any extra spacing. This is the approach I recommend.

For the setup you have right now, you will have to select the "Don't expand character spaces on a line that ends with SHIFT-RETURN" in the Layout options, found at the bottom of the Advanced category in the Word Options dialog box (Office button | Word Options).

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

You can insert a manual tab (using the tab key) at the end of the last sentence and that usually solves it. But that's just a quick fix. As Stefan posted above, I would set space after your paragraph to zero and use a hard return, that will seperate your paragraphs but have no space between them.

Definitely. Set your paragraph style to zero space before and after, and use a first line indent.
fwiw, while trying to find answers to some of my questions I've come across a site specifically for people trying to produce conventional legal documents: http://addbalance.com/usersguide/index.htm