[fiveoaks]

I have a document written in Word 2003 that seems to have portions of the text with extra tall line spacing. It's as though line spacing were set to 1.5 or even 2, even though the settings say otherwise. What gives? If necessary, maybe I can provide samples of the problem.

[slurpee55]

Highlight all of your text and then go to Format, Paragraph and see if it all has the same spacing - if it doesn't, the box under "Line Spacing" will be blank.

[MowermanEd]

Originally Posted by fiveoaks

I have a document written in Word 2003 that seems to have portions of the text with extra tall line spacing. It's as though line spacing were set to 1.5 or even 2, even though the settings say otherwise. What gives? If necessary, maybe I can provide samples of the problem.

The reason is probably because you received it from someone who used Word 2007. See here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/921174

[fiveoaks]

Actually, I created the entire document myself on Word 2003. It may be related to Styles. When I highlight an area of the document that has this problem, pull up the style select window, and select Normal, the extra spacing goes away (the text appears to collapse back to single line spacing). Of course, I have to go back and manually create any double spaced areas I want. The areas of the text that do not have this problem don not "collapse). In fact they appear unchanged after selecting "normal" style. If I highlight a line in the affected area, the highlight occupies the line of text as well as the blank line above it. Unaffected ares do not highlight the line above the text. When I highlight the affected area and go to Format/Paragraph, the line spacing shows single line spacing is selected.
The work around I've found does work, but I would like to know what is causing the condition so I can turn it off.

[fiveoaks]

I found it. When I highlight the selected area and pull up the paragraph properties sheet, the spacing before is 12 pt and the spacing after is 0 pt. For the unaffected areas, the value is 0 pt for both spacing before and after. Setting this value back to 0 for both before and after solves the problem without affecting other settings. The question is: how did this value get changed. I know I did not intentionally change it.

[Cookiegal]

Did you copy and paste those sections of text that are affected from another source document or from a web site or did you type them yourself the same way you did the rest of the text?

[fiveoaks]

Nothing was transferred from any other source. The document is a drama script I am writing and there are a lot of font style changes (bold, italics, underlines, etc) and i'm thinking that maybe the autocorrect and autoformat systems may be responsible. The most copying and pasting that I am doing is from one area to another within the same document. All double spacing is being done with a separate carriage return at the end of a line.

[slurpee55]

If you have any sections that are bulleted - or formatted without bullets but look very much the same (for instance, if you are using extra lines to separate different speakers in your script) Word, using AutoFormat, will often get confused - offhand, I would guess that it is coming from something like that.

[fiveoaks]

Sounds like you are right. Autocorrect and Autoformat are really nice, but sometimes they do bizzare things. Thanks

[slurpee55]

You can turn off Autoformat easily enough - just go to Tools, Auto Correct options and then tinker around, turning off the features you don't want (I would suspect that you want to work in the AutoFormat as you type section.)