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Pleading paper form

welcome in this tutorial will show you how you can align text with the numbers in a pleading that uses pleading paper we've developed this tutorial for our quick docks clients so the assumption is that the pleading you're working with came from our legal macro package quick docks however the concepts I'm going to show you for aligning text with the pleading paper should work in any pleading provided your pleading is set up properly to begin with many people struggle to get their text to align with the pleading paper numbers but in reality there are only a couple key formatting concepts you need to know once you know them you're home free and aply ting handling pretty much any situation you'll encounter the first concept I want to talk to you about is line spacing in a pleading you never want to use single or double line spacing the reason being that pleading paper itself uses or at least it should use an exact line height so let me get in here and I'll show you I'll just double click to get into the header and I'm clicking in here to see the pleading paper now if I go to the home ribbon and go to paragraph formatting I can see that it is using exactly 24 point line height consequently any time you want text that looks double spaced in a pleading you want to use exactly 24 point line height anytime you want text it looks single space you want to use 12 and you'll see up here in the caption if I look at this it is exactly 12 if I go down into the body text it is exactly 24 you never want to use single double-spaced what happens if you do well let's say I make this paragraph single spaced and I'll make this pair these paragraphs double spaced let me come down here I'm just pressing keystrokes on my keyboard to apply single and double spacing you can see the text just starts creeping and it doesn't it gets on and off with the alignment now to fix this with quick docks what I would do is I would just read apply the body text style to those paragraphs to put that back the way it was okay so single spaced looks is 12-point double-spaced is 24 point where things tend to go awry for people is after they've used 12-point line spacing for example what if this paragraph really should be a quote let me format it as a quote and you can see that looks good except after the paragraph suddenly we are off one line there are two ways you can handle this the first way is if you're not using justified text you can use a line break now this is justified I'm going to change that I'll just make it left aligned for a minute so you can see the line break example and I'm going to turn show/hide on so on my home ribbon in the paragraph group I can click the paragraph mark the reason I want show/hide on is to show you the non-printing characters a line break is on the keyboard shift enter shift enter pushes your text down one line but it doesn't start a new paragraph so it pushes me down exactly one line and now after the quote I'm back in alignment now why couldn't I press ENTER here well the reason for that is I would end up going too far and that is because if you look at the paragraph formatting spacing here is spaced it as around the paragraph where as line spacing is within the paragraph so this has 12-point space after the reason for that is so that it's not jammed against the text below it if I don't have 12-point space after let me I took that off the wrong paragraph turn that off you can see this is jammed against what's below it so I need that paragraph spacing but when I have it if I press ENTER what am i doing I'm starting a new paragraph consequently the paragraph spacing comes into play so shift enter is a perfect solution to just push you down exactly one line now what happens if we do that when our text is justified well there is a setting and word that when it is on your text will stretch to match the right edge because this paragraph is justified at the end of every line needs to end at the same spot and you can see that looks really awkward and in fact if there were even less words in this paragraph it looks even more awkward the setting that makes it stretch it's on by default in Microsoft Word so if you're using justified quotes you probably want to avoid that so your other solution is to go below the exactly twelve point line spaced paragraph and press ctrl 0 not o is an open but 0 as in the number and I'm pressing that repeatedly on my keyboard right now that toggles often on 12-point space before I'll show you what that is here in the paragraph formatting is on right now it added 12-point space before this paragraph in effect dropping it down exactly one line so it's lined up with the number the reason I prefer the line break if your text isn't justified is because when you use ctrl 0 it is formatting that is on that paragraph so let's say I'm the secretary and I was cleaning this up I formatted it all nice to get it to a line and then you're the attorney and you come in and you want to work on this document and you don't know about this whole control 0 thing you press ENTER here to type some more paragraphs and you start typing along as you type each paragraph carries forward that extra spacing now you've got these weird gaps between all your paragraphs now I could fix this again by just applying the proper style I'll go through here to do it but if you're not aware of it obviously you can see how that trick some people into messing up their document and they don't know what to do about it other than that there's absolutely no reason not to use ctrl 0 you just need to know what you're doing what it does and it will work just fine for you when else will this happen to you well if your headings look single spaced and in this case I'm using line headings that do look single-spaced they're 12-point line spaced but you can see here if I applied the heading to this paragraph I'm off after it because there are an even number of lines in the paragraph so once again shift enter this was not justified so that worked just fine or you can go below it and do the ctrl 0 same thing now if you want let me press ctrl 0 again here you could go to the heading or the quote paragraph and press ctrl 0 dropping it down a line just know that it's not starting with a number then the a here is in between two numbers which you may or may not care about some people really don't like the gap that you see between the heading and the paragraph below it but it's just simple math one way or the other you're going to have to have an extra line sort the space if you want to align with those numbers the other situation you'll run into is at the beginning of the pleading after the caption now mine by fate align just fine but depending on what you have going on up here you may have co-counsel you may have plaintiffs and defendants with really long names you may have a pleading that starts in between and I just put an extra hard return up here to make that happen so you can see what it would look like typically if a pleading set up well the person designing it will put an extra hard return right under the caption and that is formatted specifically so that you can go to it and press ENTER to push yourself down exactly one line now I can't go to the body text where I'm going to start typing because this has the body text style on it and that has my 24 point line spacing so what happens if I press enter here I'm going to go too far but from here this is using the normal style it is exactly twelve point line spacing with no space after it so when I press ENTER I go down exactly one line alternatively in the pleading caption delete or add hard returns also to push things down a line just up to you how you want it to look in summary just remember you always want to use exactly 12 and exactly 24 point line spacing assuming you're pleading papers using exactly 24 point line spacing and you can use ctrl 0 to drop a paragraph and down a line or you can use shift enter if it's not justified at the end of the text that looks single-spaced I said that at the end of this tutorial I would talk a little bit about having the pleading set up properly notice that this is 28 line numbered pleading paper everything looks good the text aligns with it properly if you happen to have a quote at the end of a page it picks up in the exact right place on the next page that's because we set this pleading up with a bunch of settings that are necessary to make that happen this came from our templates we just ran the macro for a new pleading filled in the information and it set the pleading up for us I'm going to show you what happens if your pleadings not set up properly if you don't have those settings I just pause the video and reset the document layout settings and you can see that now things aren't quite right for one thing the text starts too high now some people see this and you think oh we'll just lower your top margin but the problem is that where you have your 24 point line spacing text I'll copy and paste this a bunch of times to make it go longer it is starting in the right place so the problem when you don't have the layout option set up properly is that the 12 point line space text does not start in the right place and you can see here where this quote spanned two pages that it's higher than the number just like it was at the top also suddenly my 28 is getting cut off and text may not go to the bottom of the page properly there's a button for that with our macro package that will fix this for you if you maybe inherited of pleading from someone else that isn't set up properly and there you can see it's all fixed thanks for joining us we hope you find our YouTube tips helpful we'd like to invite you to visit us on our website law office solution com