For the last several years, I’ve been having a spacing issue with Word.  No, it’s not that I do not know how to set line spacing to single, double, etc.  I’ve been doing that in every single version of Microsoft Word since Wordperfect. (Yes, I’ve been using computers that long. My About me).

See?  And double spacing was out of control:

Seriously, I am not making this up:

When I did google searches in hopes of finding a solution, I would mainly find “How to select single, double, etc space” and other simplistic formatting explanations.  Once in a while I would find someone with my problem, but when there was a solution proffered that wasn’t “how to double space”, it never worked.

Then one day, not long ago, I was given a HINT by the Gods of word processing: At some point, I changed the font, and the spacing changed.  Now, I knew already that line spacing depended to some extent upon font, but that much???  Still, it gave me hope, but I was too busy to really look into it.  For several weeks (it might have been months), I kept setting spacing to Exactly ____ when I wanted single or double spacing:

Of course, it wasn’t always necessary.  Sometimes the spacing would work fine.  I do a lot of exchanging documents with other people (who have Macs). I had always kind of assumed the formatting was getting whacky because of software switches.

The Microsoft Word Spacing solution:

And then yesterday, the gods of word processing once again stepped in and inspired me to open the FONT tab.  I rarely do that, because you can do almost everything you need in the Paragraph tab.  But I did and discovered that I wasn’t using Times New Roman… at least not the Times New Roman I should have been using:

Apparently, my font was getting changed to Times New Roman Unicode. It was happening at unpredictable times… Or if there is a pattern, I have not been paying enough attention to notice it.

Changed it to “Times New Roman” (standard) and all the spacing issues go away.

So there’s the easy solution to the Microsoft Word spacing problem. Now, why couldn’t someone have posted that somewhere easily searchable years ago??