in this lesson we're going to learn
about how to modify the spacing within
our text we're working with our school
newsletter and let's take a look at some
of the text that's on page 2 of our
newsletter let's navigate to page 2 by
selecting the page 2 icon at the bottom
of the page let's go ahead and scroll
down and let's take a look at this text
at the bottom of the page that's in
yellow now let's look to see exactly
what this text looks like right now take
note of the spacing between the
paragraphs as well as the spacing
between the lines now let's say that we
would like to have more space after each
paragraph in our text box in order to do
that we need to change our paragraph
spacing we need to select our text then
we need to come up to the main menu and
select format and click on paragraph
we're now in our paragraph dialog box
and we're on the indents and spacing tab
let's come on down to the line spacing
section take note of any changes that
occur down in the sample window at the
bottom of the dialog box we can change
the spacing before our paragraphs let's
go ahead and set this one back to 0 and
for our newsletter and this text we'd
like to go ahead and increase our hour
after paragraph spacing to about 12 in
order to save that let's click on OK now
you can see that we have a lot more
space in between our paragraphs in our
text box let's say that we also want to
add more space between each line in our
text in order to do that we need to
modify our line spacing we first need to
select our text come back up to our main
menu
select format choose paragraph we're
back in our paragraph dialog box and
we're on our indents and spacing tab
we're going to come back down to the
line spacing section and let's increase
our spacing between our lines again take
note of the changes that are taking
place in the sample window for our text
we'd like to go ahead and set it at
about 1.5 in order to save that click on
ok let's take note of the changes that
have been made in our text not only do
we have more space in between each
paragraph but we also have more spacing
between each line in addition to line
spacing and paragraph spacing changes we
also have the option to modify our
alignment within that paragraph dialog
box let's select our text go back up to
our main menu and select format let's
choose paragraph again and take a look
at our paragraph dialog box we're on the
indents and spacing tab and we can see
that under general we have the alignment
options let's click on the down arrow we
can see that we can align our text to
the left to the center or to the right
again make note of these changes in the
sample window below however I prefer to
use the alignment icons from the
formatting toolbar let's take a look at
those we can click cancel to get out of
this dialog box our text is still
selected so let's head up to the
formatting toolbar and let's click on
the center align icon you can see the
changes that are made with the alignment
in our text now let's click on the align
right icon and again the alignment is to
the right let
put it back to left a line that makes a
lot more sense in this text box so as
you can see you can change your
alignment from the paragraph dialog box
or you can use these icons on the
formatting toolbar in addition to
changing the spacing between our
paragraphs and our lines within our text
we can also change the spacing between
the actual characters or letters within
our text in order to do that we need to
change our character spacing let's go to
the top of the second page here and
select a different portion of text let's
select this whole top section now we're
going to come back up to our format menu
and this time we're going to choose
character spacing our character spacing
dialog box appears let's take a look at
some of these features you may not use
these very often but it is important to
know where to make these changes the
first section we have is called scaling
gaylene is where we shrink or stretch
the selected text as you can see we can
increase our character scaling to be
over one hundred percent take note of
the changes being made in the sample box
below or you can decrease the scaling to
be less than one hundred percent let's
keep ours right at one hundred to change
the spacing between all text characters
will need to adjust the tracking let's
come down to the tracking section see
our drop-down box we can leave tracking
it normal we could make it very tight
again make note of any changes in the
sample window below we could make it
tight loose
or very loose let's keep ours at very
loose and select okay
as you can see increasing our tracking
has added more space between each
character in our text unfortunately some
of the last few sentences are not
displayed why don't we go back into our
format menu and tweak that just a little
bit let's go up and select format select
character spacing let's go down to our
tracking and decrease this manually
let's go down to about a hundred and ten
percent let's see how this works with
our text come down and select ok now the
text fills up our space perfectly in
addition to tracking another character
spacing option is kerning this is when
you change the space between two
specific text characters in our case
let's deselect our text by clicking off
of it and let's zoom in on our title
let's select our zoom bar and let's
click on one hundred percent let's
scroll over and look at the D and the e
in the title of our article let's
highlight these two letters now we need
to go back up to our format menu select
character spacing and let's take a look
at the kerning again this is the option
that we use to fine-tune the spacing
between two specific characters we can
leave it at normal we can expand that
spacing by a specific amount or we can
condense the spacing again by a specific
amount let's go ahead and expand our
spacing by about five points now select
ok and we can see the difference that
we've made between the D and the
and our title well I've decided that I
don't want to keep that kerning in my
title so I'm going to go ahead and click
the undo icon let's deselect our
characters and let's scroll down and
take a look at the text now you should
have a pretty good idea of how to modify
the spacing within the text on your
document you can play around with this
on your own