Tech Tips for Writers is an (almost) weekly post on overcoming Tech Dread. I’ll cover issues that friends, both real-time and virtual, have shared. Feel free to post a comment about a question you have. I’ll cover it in a future Tip.

Q: My Word 2010 came with a default for double space between paragraphs, but I don’t like that. I’ve tried to reset it to single space, but it doesn’t fix it. What do I do?

A: I don’t either. What was Bill Gates thinking? Don’t as many people start a paragraph with a tab indent as a double space between paragraphs?

Now I have to fix that every time I open a Word doc. Here’s how to do it (in Word 2010):

• Go to Page Layout
• Go to Paragraph, Spacing
• Make sure ‘after’ is set to 0–not 10.

To make this the default: