Section 9: Character Spacing

Microsoft Word has many other features that can help you with the development of your long document. One such feature allows you to condense text so that you can fit more words on the same line. This might be useful where you have a paragraph with the last word sitting on its own line and you want that word to fit on the previous line. This can be more of a problem if the last word spills over onto the next page. The solution here would be to slightly condense the selected text to reduce the number of lines in this paragraph.

In this example, the word “courses…” is on the fourth line of this paragraph; by condensing the text in this paragraph, the word “courses…” will then fit on the third line so that the number of lines for this paragraph has been reduced to three lines.

Continue to the next slide to learn how to condense selected text in your long document.

To condense the text, select a paragraph of text in your document as shown here, open the Home ribbon, and then click on the Font button to open the Font dialog box. Open the Advanced tab, select the Condensed option from the Spacing drop-down list, enter 0.1 (or a higher number if you wish), and then click on the OK button. This will close the Font dialog box.

You can now see in this example that the text has condensed enough to allow the word “courses…” to go to the previous line and, hence, reducing the number of lines for this paragraph.

When using this feature, be careful not to condense the text to the point where it is difficult to read or does not look the same as the rest of the text in your document. As with most features in Microsoft Word, some experimentation may be needed to get the desired result.