I'm trying to do something in Word that sounds simple but I still can't find a simple solution.
Essentially, to increase readability of a bullet list and clearly distinguish each item, I wish to have some spacing between these items. Something like "Spacing after: 6pt" looks about right in my case.
At the same time, I want the list itself to be visually separated from the rest of the text it is embedded in. Specifically, I'd like to increase spacing before and after to about 18pt.
So, this is how it would look like in Word. 6pt spacing between the list items, 18pt spacing before and after the list as a whole:
I simply can't figure out how to combine the two using style templates. To create the screenshot, I applied one style to all bullet points (i.e. spacing 6pt after) and manually overrode that style on the first (18pt before) and last item (18pt after). And this clearly defeats the purpose of using styles.
Am I overlooking something here or is this really just not possible with Word?
23 Answers
See Shauna Kelly's page on How to Control Bullets in Word.
1. Begin with the end in mind
To control bullets, don't use the bullets button on the ribbon. That will drive you crazy.
Instead, create a list style to manage the bullets, and then apply the built-in paragraph styles List Bullet, List Bullet 2, List Bullet 3 etc to your text.
It's actually not hard to do this, once you get the hang of it. After you've done this a couple of times it will take less time to set up your bullets than it will to read this article.
Her page goes on to show how to use these. I strongly recommend reading that page. The key is to use the styles to apply the bullets, not the bullet buttons on the Ribbon. This is very much related to her page on automatic heading/outline numbering. The only real difference is using the styles already labeled for bullets. (You could use any existing paragraph style.)
Then, you modify the style definitions to get the spacing you want.
6Alas, I've come to understand it's not possible.
Since a paragraph style is applied to each list item separately, one only has two options with regards to paragraph spacing:
- Either ignore the spacing between paragraphs of the same style, in fact creating a spacing style that is applied to the list as a whole.
- Or create a style that applies spacing between paragraphs of the same style within the list, i.e. between the list items.
Unfortunately, you cannot combine the two in any way for two reasons. First, Word does not allow to combine styles of the same type. Just as with classes in OOP, the inheriting style simply takes precedence when it redefines a setting. Secondly, in terms of styles, MS Word does not differentiate between regular paragraphs and lists. A list is really just a collection of paragraphs of the same kind.
Confirmed, among others, in the Microsoft Community by MS MVP Suzanne S. Barnhill.
2[...] to have some space between paragraphs and a larger space after the block of paragraphs. There is currently no built-in way to do that.
One way to do this is to give the Bullet Points a different Style in Word (recent version) and use the paragraph spacing in the Style to change as you need. This is the best way as (a) the Style will always be available and (b) can be applied to any line or paragraph that you choose.
So you would have Main Style (I use Normal) and the Bullet Style (give it a name). This works for me.
Then, I can easily put an extra line top and bottom in the main style and adjust the size of the line to best appearance.
Here is a complete screen shot of what I said in words.
Space before and after the bulleted paragraph.
New Style applied just to the bullets.
The result looks like (very similar to) your question
