Not justifying last line of paragraph

[Chrissie]

When fully justifying the text in my paragraph (in Word), how do I prevent
the last line of just a few words from being strung out across the whole line
(i.e. too much spacing between words)?

I am using Office 2007, and still trying to get used to it.

I saw a previous posting with "Enabling the Compatability Option 'Don't
expand character spaces on the line ending Shift-Return'", but can't work out
where to find this, or if it will help me.

 

[grammatim]

If you end a paragraph with Enter, it shouldn't space out the last
line anyway. (If you type a line-end, the Compatibility Option will
give you the effect you need.)

You'll find it under Office Menu > Word Options (bottom of the panel
near the right corner) > Advanced > scroll all the way to the bottom,
and below Compatibility Options there's a tiny plus sign next to
"Layout Options." Click that plus, and you'll find many more options
than you ever wanted to know about.

(See adjacent thread called Compatibility Options for the link to the
Microsoft document explaining them, some more clearly than others.)

 

[Chrissie]

Thanks for the prompt response. I'm editing some documents, so will let you
know how it goes.

 

[Chrissie]

What do I do when the last line of the paragraph is at the bottom of the
page, and I can't afford a spare line? I just tried it and it gave me an
extra page; when I tried deleting backwards, it put the last line all the way
across the page again (it worked OK when it wasn't right at the bottom of the
page).

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

This gave you an extra page because pressing Enter gave you an empty
paragraph, which suggests that there is already a paragraph break present
(there would have to be, as a paragraph can't end in a line break). Display
nonprinting characters (Ctrl+*) so that you can see the paragraph breaks and
line breaks. Then delete just the line break (if you don't know what a line
break looks like, see http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/NonPrintChars.htm

 

[Chrissie]

Thank you very much Suzanne, that is most helpful.