Maintain paragraph spacing?

[jake62]

Hello:

Newbie here.

I have a problem I hope somebody can solve. I am using XP sp2 and word 2003.

The problem is I am writing a multi page document. At the bottom of the first page is a single line of text that is not part of any text after it. At the beginning of the next page is a paragraph of text.



If I add a couple of sentences of text above the first page bottom line of text, the last line goes to the next page and is combined with the following page text.

This is normal if the line is part of the next page paragraph. The problem is it doesn't keep the empty line between the first line on the second page and the paragraph that was at the top of the second page.

This presents a major problem with multi page documents that sometimes consist of single lines of text. It forces the writer to go through every page and make sure the lines of text do not run together.

This might be easier if I provide before and after examples below.

BEFORE

John had several dogs that were special, but had not won any ribbons.

Page break ______________________________

Bill had several dogs that won blue ribbons. He later sold them to his brother which also won blue ribbons.

AFTER

Page break ______________________________

John had several dogs that were special, but had not won any ribbons.
Bill had several dogs that won blue ribbons. He later sold them to his brother which also won blue ribbons.

SHOULD BE

Page break ______________________________

John had several dogs that were special, but had not won any ribbons.

Bill had several dogs that won blue ribbons. He later sold them to his brother which also won blue ribbons.

If anyone can help it would be appreciated.

Jake

[Ulodesk]

You will not have this problem if you format your paragraphs with space above and below, rather than using blank lines in-between. Here's how:

Triple-click a paragraph, which selects the text and the hidden, crucial paragraph sign following it. Right-click and select "Format paragraph" or go to your menus and select Format/Paragraph. Toward the bottom left of the dialogue box, you will see "Space above" and "Space Below". If your text is 11 or 12 pt, single spaced, try entering "6 pt" (6 points), without the quote marks, in each. Alternately, you may leave the "above" at 0 and enter "12 pt" for below.

Of course, you don't want to have to do this for every paragraph, so you will wish to either make this your regular body text style or create a new one. Here is where you need to look up Styles and how to create a style from a selection. In brief, select the newly formatted paragraph the same way as before, open the Styles pane, and either Modify the existing style (which may be named "Normal") to reflect this change, or create a new style, with whatever name you'd like, based on this formatting. Once that's done, you can apply this paragraph style to any paragraph(s) with the click of a mouse.

[jake62]

Thanks a lot for the answer. Especially the shortcut.

It was a real hassle when some documents were over 100 pages. I would have to go completely through the entire document scanning for the errors.

Thanks again,

John