Office Professional Plus 2010 What does single spa

I don't post here often, so I'll remind you who I am. My name is Roxanne Kenison, and I'm on the team that publishes Word-related content on Office Online.
When you first booted up Word 2007 and started working on documents, you probably noticed that Word 2007's default layout is to space lines a little looser on the page than in previous versions. In general, this makes for documents that are easier on the eye because there's more white space. It's better document design, and one of the design priorities for Word 2007 was to make it easy to make "professional looking" documents. Not everyone sees it this way, of course. A lot of you feel that Word messed up what used to be perfectly good single spacing. So many of you, in fact, that if you now call 1-800-MICROSOFT and press 5 in the Office menu, you'll hear the URL of a KB article that explains how to get your old-fashioned single spacing back (quick answer: use the Word 2003 Quick Style set).
At about the same time the phone support team was logging a lot of calls regarding line spacing,Microsoft Office 2010 Key, my team was noticing low ratings on our how-to content that walks through the steps of changing line spacing within and between paragraphs. Mind you,Windows 7 Product Key, this was the same help topic we'd published in the previous version of Word, updated for the new version. It hadn't shown up on our radar before as being problematic content. Why all of a sudden,Microsoft Office 2007 Key, we wondered, are people having trouble adjusting line spacing? It's not harder to do than it used to be, we thought. Then we looked at the customer feedback – the comments you can add after you click "Yes," "No," or "I don't know" to the "Was this information helpful?" question. Yes, we really do read your comments, especially if a topic is getting lots of traffic, a low rating, and lots of comments. From the feedback it was clear that the problem was not one of customers wanting to learn how to adjust line spacing. No. Customers just wanted Word 2007 to lay out documents the way it always had before. Instead of thinking, "Oooh, what a professional looking document!" they were thinking, "How come the spacing is screwed up?" They were frustrated that now they needed to learn how to set something in Word that they never had to set before, because they liked the old template just fine.
Maybe this one gets chalked up to the Word-is-trying-to-do-too-much-for-me-and-I-wish-it-would-just-mind-its-own-business camp. Design is subjective, after all. Personally, I like the looser line spacing. I'm not crazy about the extra space between the paragraphs. Still, it doesn't bug me enough to change the settings for the Normal paragraph style and save that as a new default, but that's not hard to do, once you learn how. Maybe we need to make that step easier to find in Help.
After looking at the customer feedback and comparing notes with the phone support team, my team revised the original help topic, and wrote three more (see the See Also links next to the topic). We published them as a draft to gather more feedback, and we're currently in the process of incorporating that feedback to improve them even more. One lesson here for me was to see how well our customer feedback data correlates with what the support team hears on the telephone every day. I'm proud of the fact that we can respond with updated content, and even an option on the free phone-menu system. Back in the days of static help content, it would have been much harder to get the word out.
Another lesson here for me is that lots of people seem to think of Word as a typewriter (remember typewriters?). There are many examples of this, in the way people construct a table of contents for their Word documents, use the TAB key to align columns,Windows 7, and the way they always hit ENTER twice after typing each paragraph (for those who are fans of extra space between paragraphs). Many, many of the feedback comments on the line-spacing issue had to do with wanting "single spacing." But, of course the line spacing in the new template is single spacing. It's just that it's a little bit "more" than single spacing used to be: 1.15,Office Professional Plus 2010, instead of 1.0. But what is 1.0? You might think that if you're using an 11-point font that line spacing of 1.0 would be 11 points. But if you lay out paragraphs that way – depending on the font you're using – the parts that stick below one line will crash into the parts that stick up from the line below. You need to allow some extra space between lines. In a former life when I set type on a Compugraphic phototypesetting machine, the convention we used was about 20% extra space, so we'd set 10-point type on a 12-point line. Larger fonts demanded more breathing room. This was at a newspaper, so we spaced things a bit tighter than you'd expect to see in, say, a report or a brochure (or, dare I say… a professional looking document).
Word lets you specify single, double, and "1.5" spacing, they way typewriters used to do. Every time you pushed the carriage return, the ratchet would increment by the specified number, advancing the paper. I don't know how those dimensions translate to point-size spacing (even us phototypesetter folk called it "leading," harkening back to an industrial era of metal and heat). For the record, you can set spacing that way in Word, too: in the Paragraph dialog box, you choose Exactly under Line Spacing, and then type the number of points in the At box. You can make your "single spacing" as loose or as tight as you like.
So, Word is a hybrid, not exactly a typesetting program, but certainly more useful and wonderful than a typewriter ever was. I don't miss typewriters in the slightest, even if the manual ones did give me strong pinkies. Sometimes I do get a little nostalgic for the old Compugraphic, though.
I shared the story of how customers are receiving the looser line spacing with David Salaguinto, a colleague of mine who has started drawing a series of tech-related comics called Office Offline. We realize that not everyone likes the change, and he's hoping to bring some levity to the situation. Not everyone will like his comics, either. We all have points of view – that makes sharing them a whole lot more interesting. So, let us know what you think; we love feedback. Thrive on it, in fact.

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