Learn how to change spacing between characters in MS Word. In this tutorial you will also see how to manage space between lines & paragraphs. How to Adjust Letter Spacing in Word pc shastra. Expand or condense the space evenly between all the selected characters. Select the text. How do I increase space between words (not letters) in MS Word?
. If you are a regular user of Microsoft Word or any word processing program I'm sure that you know that you can change the typestyle or font to suit your needs. If it wasn't for fonts we would all have the same boring looking letters, flyers and other documents. Most computers will have many fonts to choose from but keep in mind that your font choices will be based on what fonts you have installed on your computer. Windows comes with preinstalled fonts and when you install other programs sometimes they install additional fonts as well. You can also download fonts online or buy font CDs that come with hundreds or thousands of fonts.
Or if you see a font on another computer you like then you can copy it to a disk and install it on your own computer. To see all the fonts installed on your computer as well as preview how they look you can open your Fonts applet in Control Panel.
You can also install new fonts here as well as copy them to disk to use on another computer. There may come a time when you find a font you really like and want to use it in your Word document but the spacing between the letters doesn't look right and they seem too close together making the words look 'squished'.
Fortunately there is a way to adjust this spacing and it's pretty easy to do. To make the change in the font spacing you will need to first highlight the text you want to change and click on the Font Dialog Box Launcher arrow. The Font Dialog Box Launcher arrow is located on the bottom right corner of the font area on the Word ribbon.
After you open the Font dialog box you will then click on the Character Spacing tab in Word 2007 or the Advanced tab for Word 2010 and go to the Spacing section. From here you will choose a spacing option for your font.
You can choose either expanded to stretch out the font or condensed to shrink it up. After that you will have to choose by how much by entering a number in the By box or by using the up and down arrows to incrementally change the value. Here is an example of some text before and after the adjustment so you can see how much of a difference the letter spacing can make when you want to stretch out the font. There is also an option to Stretch or scale the text horizontally by using the Scale option. In the Scale box, choose a percentage that you want to scale the text.
Numbers above 100% stretch the text and numbers below 100% compress the text.
I believe the word 'squish' refers to the spacing between characters. My WordPad, too, used to have invariable spacing between characters but today - right in the middle of a document and for no reason that I can think of - it started giving variable spacing between characters.
In WordPad there is no character spacing option under the Advanced Tab of the Font Dialog. How do I restore the default? I noticed a heading in this blog entitled 'How to Restore WordPad Defaults' but the answer was 'instead of restoring your default, why not do you own thing by.' This is NOT what the person asked. How do I restore defaults? In WordPad, nothing else.
I am experienced in them. WordPad is new to me. Hello Jay Henderson, I haven't been able to reproduce the issue you are having in Wordpad in Windows 7. Can you give more details? What font and size of font are you using?
Do you have Word Wrap on under the View tab? If you do a search on the internet you can find information on using the Windows Vista version of Wordpad in Windows 7. However, this would not be a supported scenario but should not affect other components in Windows 7. Thanks, Marilyn Microsoft Answers Support Engineer Visit our and let us know what you think. The squishy variable spacing happened to me the first time I tried to use WordPad on a new Windows 7 installation. I have only ever before seen this kind of variable word spacing in text that has been justified (aligned to both the left and right margins.) To fix it I tried selecting all of the text and justifying center, then left, however neither fixed it.
My next move was to install the old version of WordPad that I found here: The installation went fine and the old version (described as being 'without ribbons') works fine. As an experiment I copied the correctly formatted text from the old version of WordPad into the new, broken version, and the spacing did stay fixed, but I have no idea what might make it go wonky again so I'm not inclined to use it. I believe this is a bug in the software that is causing the word spacing to behave as if the text were justified.
Until they fix the bug it might be best to use a different version.