Windows Tools, Help & Guides

For some reason the developers of Office (2007 and 2010) believe that every letter or document you write should use a line-space setting of 1,5. Which really hasn’t been used since the day of typewriters. Back when you had no other layout option. Another thing annoying me is the custom setting og 10 pt. space after each paragraph you write.

Okay, this ensures that your letters (or emails) use lots of “air” and can easily be read by anyone. But being a graphics designer, this layout is ugly. Not to mention, how much space you waste. With a little tweaking you can save at least one page when printing your documents. And in these environmental times, thats not such a bad thing either.

Most users i meet doesn’t know how to fix this, or do so permanently, so this is how.

Make the Changes

The following settings and changes will affect all Office Documents that use the NORMAL.DOT (dotm) template, and can be applied to each program, if so desired.

1. Click the File Tab (Blue one) and choose open
2. Browse to the Template Folder
   Usually: C:\Users\[-UserName-]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates
   (you might need to show hidden files and folders to find it)
3. Open the file Normal.dotm
4. (Optional) You may type in some text to see that the changes are applied.
   On a blank line, Type =rand() and press ENTER.
   Highlight all the text in the document, using CTRL + A.
5. Click the LineSpacing tool and change the setting from 1,5 to 1
   (if you have example text, you should see immediate changes)
   
6. Click the LineSpacing Tool again, and choose Line Spacing Options
   and locate the label Spacing.
   
7. Change the spacing from 10 to a lower number 0-2 should be enough.
8. Click OK
9. Delete all text from the document (if any)
10. Save the Document (Not Save As)

 

From now on, every new document will have these new settings.
In case you would like to do the same thing in Outlook 2010 the default template filename is: NormalEmail.dotm

 

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