Removing Space Before Paragraphs

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated August 23, 2021)
This tip applies to Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003

You know that Word allows you to control exactly how much space appears before and after a paragraph. (Display the Paragraph dialog box and then use the Before and After settings to make your specifications.) If you have quite a bit of formatting to do, and you need to remove space that someone else has set before paragraphs, you may be interested in this tip.

Word includes a handy toolbar button you can use to automatically remove space before paragraphs. In other words, it sets the Before value in the Paragraph dialog box to zero. This tool is available in versions of Word through Word 2003; it is not available in later versions.

You can add this tool to your toolbar by following these steps:

Choose Customize from the Tools menu. Word displays the Customize dialog box.
Make sure the Commands tab is selected. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The Commands tab of the Customize dialog box.

In the list of Categories, choose All Commands.
In the list of Commands, choose CloseUpPara.
Use the mouse to drag CloseUpPara from the Commands list to its new location on the toolbar. When you release the mouse button, the icon for the command appears on the toolbar.
Click on Close to dismiss the Customize dialog box.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (627) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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