A lot of legal secretaries have written to me asking for ways to quickly change the line spacing in a document as they are frequently moving from single line spacing for block quotes and double line spacing for text and then back to single line spacing for signature blocks in pleadings.
It really isn’t all that difficult. If you find that you are frequently changing the line spacing in MS Word to double or you are making the switch more often than not, it’s time to take measures so that this happens seamlessly and without lots of time and keystrokes.
After speaking with more than a few of these secretaries I found that most of them were using the Normal style in their documents and so I will assume for this tip that everyone is, although hopefully not!
I could tell you how to modify your Normal.dot style, which is the style on which you base every new document in MS Word, but I don’t see the point to that because then every document you create would have double line spacing. Wouldn’t that be a fine howdy do?
Instead, I will give you a quick key combination to use to change your line spacing on the fly in your documents.
When you are setting up your document using the Normal.dot style, everything will be in single line spacing.
Once you have typed the heading of your pleading, you now want to start using double line spacing so place your cursor where you want that spacing to start and depress and hold your CTRL key and click the number 2 on your keyboard.
That’s it! When you want to go back to single spacing, depress and hold your CTRL key and click on the number 1 on your keyboard.
Quick and easy, just the way I like it!
Having said all of that, if you are a legal secretary and are in a practice where you have lots of pleadings, it would behoove you to start using styles and/or templates – they make your life soooo much easier and it makes you look sooo professional!