Why is paragraph spacing no longer additive in Office 365 MS Word?

Question

Using Word in Microsoft Office 365, why doesn't the following paragraph spacing produce 12 pts between successive paragraphs? Is there a configuration that controls this behavior?

Answer 1

Your assumption that the paragraph line spacing settings are additive is incorrect.

The Before and After line spacing settings allow you to specify the exact spacing in points between the paragraph in question and those that proceed or follow it.

Some examples:

• Paragraph A specifies 0 points spacing after. Paragraph B specifies 6 points spacing before. The paragraphs will be separated by 6 points.
• Paragraphs A, B, and C are all set to 6 points before and after. Each paragraph is spaced by 6 points.
• Paragraph A specifies 12 points spacing after. Paragraph B specifies 0 points spacing before. The paragraphs will be separated by 12 points.

Here's a screen shot of two identically formatted documents demonstrating the above examples. The first is from Word 2013 (in this regard, it's functionally identically to the Word 2016 delivered through Office 365 subscriptions as of this writing). The second document is from Word 2007. As you can see, the behavior of the paragraph spacing is consistent with the observation that spacing is not additive, and that it's probably never been additive in Word:

Answer 2

I just encountered the same problem. I found that there is actually a setting that allows the spacing to be additive:

Word Options-> Advanced-> Layout options for-> HTML paragraph auto spacing option