I can't seem to reply to your reply to my reply (I get an error message
about a malformed header), so I'm replying to this one instead:

Yes, I'm pretty sure lists were what the developers had in mind with the
"Don't add space" setting. In Word 2007, the List Paragraph style has this
enabled by default.

I usually end up with space between list items anyway. Tightly spaced lists
are fine for bulleted lists where no item is more than one line long. Once
you start having runover lines, it seems to look better with at least some
space beween items.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

"bubbakittee" wrote in message
...
Does anyone have guidelines or "best practices" regarding the use of
Word's paragraph spacing capabilities ??

For example, suppose I want 12 points of space in between any given
pair of consecutive "body" paragraphs. How should I define my "body"
style ? Should I use:
(1) 12 points before and zero points after, or
(2) Zero points before and 12 after, or
(3) 6 points before and 6 after
(4) Something else

It seems to me that #3 works best. The only downside is that the 6 pts
of "space before" prevents me from putting headings close to my body
paragraphs (which I sometimes want to do). I have tried #2, also, and
it seems to create a lot of extra work with spacing around figures,
tables, and bulleted lists.

For your amusement ... many years ago, I edited some docs from the
documentation group at Microsoft. Their approach was to put in an
extra carriage return, and then adjust its height. I hope that's not
the best approach these days.

thanks

bk