How to prevent automatic space before paragraph?

Dear @Amanda Walker,

Thank you for reaching out to Microsoft Q&A forum.

I understand you're experiencing an issue with automatic spacing in Outlook. From what I’ve found, Outlook treats the "Enter" key as a hard paragraph break, which by default adds padding (spacing) before or after the text. Since Outlook uses a Word-based editor, it often applies these paragraph styles unless you explicitly modify them.

To prevent this issue from occurring in every new message and reply, you must change the default spacing for the underlying template.

1. Open Outlook and start a New Email.
2. Click into the body of the email and select the Format Text tab.
3. Click the small dialog box launcher (arrow icon) in the corner of the Paragraph group.
4. In the window that appears, set both Before and After spacing to 0 pt.
5. Set Line spacing to Single.
6. Click the Set As Default button at the bottom.
7. Select "All documents based on the NormalEmail.dotm template" and click OK.

Sometimes, a signature carries hidden "Paragraph" tags even if the rest of the email is formatted correctly. This issue usually happens when signatures are copied from Word or a website.

• When editing your signature in the Outlook settings, do not use the "Enter" key for new lines. Instead, use Shift + Enter, which creates a manual line break without adding paragraph spacing.
• If you’ve copied your signature from elsewhere, I recommend pasting it into Notepad first to strip away any hidden HTML or paragraph formatting. Then, copy it from Notepad and paste it back into the Outlook Signature editor.
• After pasting your signature back into Outlook, manually re-apply any bolding or links as needed.

I hope this information is helpful. Please follow these steps and let me know if it works for you. If not, we can work together to resolve this. Thank you for your patience and understanding. If you have any questions or need further assistance, please feel free to share them in the comments so I can continue to support you. I'm looking forward to your reply.

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