Sometimes a little formatting and customization of the look of your Google Doc can make your files look a lot nicer.
For example, one thing that some people might do when working on their document is add horizontal lines to divide certain sections.
When you have a horizontal line in your document, there are some different customization options that you have control over.
One such thing that you can control is the thickness of the line.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to change the thickness of a horizontal line in Google Docs.
Table of Contents
How to Change the Thickness of the Line
There are several different ways to adjust the thickness of a line in your document.
Ultimately it depends on how the line was created.
There are different ways to create horizontal lines in your file, and each way has its own steps for increasing the thickness.
Below I will teach you the methods to insert horizontal lines in your file, and how to increase the thickness of them
There are a few different methods that I will show
- Inserting a horizontal line
- Underscore line
- Drawing to create a horizontal line
- Creating a line with paragraph borders
Inserting a Horizontal Line
The first method that I will show is simply inserting a horizontal line through the insert option in the top menu.
This is by far the easiest way to get a line in your file, however, you are almost most limited on the ways you can change its thickness.
Here are the steps to insert a horizontal line and change its thickness:
1. First open your Google Doc and then select in your file where you want the line to appear
2. In the top menu select Insert>Horizontal line
3. You will now see a horizontal line in your file. Now we can make it thicker by using the highlight tool. Highlight the line
4. In the toolbar select the “highlight color” tool and select the color you want your line to be
5. You will now have a much thicker line in your document
The good thing about this method is that it is very quick and easy to do, however, there are a couple of drawbacks.
One is that the colors don’t match your initially created line and the highlighted line. There will always be this color mismatch.
The other drawback of this method is that you can’t really adjust the thickness of the line from here. You can create a thin line or a thick line, but you can’t adjust it beyond this.
Underscore Line
Similar to the previous option, we can use the highlight tool along with underscores to create a horizontal line in our file.
One good thing about this method is that by changing the font size we can also change the thickness of the line.
Here are the steps to do this:
1. Open your Google Doc and select in your file where you want the line to appear
2. In the toolbar select the highlight tool and select a color. We want the color to be the same color as our text color so here I have chosen black
3. Now in the font size tool we can select the size that will correspond to the thickness of our line. Select a smaller size for a thinner line and larger size for a thicker size
4. Now begin typing underscores in your file. Keep pressing the underscore “_” button on your keyboard until your line is all the way across your document
Drawing to Create a Horizontal Line
Another great way to create a horizontal line where we have complete control over the thickness of the line is to create a line using the built-in drawing feature in Google Docs.
With this method, you can control exactly how thick your line is.
Here are the steps to do this:
1. Select the place in your file where you want the line to appear
2. In the top menu select Insert>Drawing>New
3. The drawing editor will appear on your screen. From the toolbar in the drawing editor select Line
4. Click and drag your mouse to create a line of the desired length. When the line is created, click on the line to select it
5. In the tool bar select the “Line weight” option and from the drop-down select the weight of your line. A lower number will create a thinner line and a higher number will create a thicker line
6. After you have selected line weight you will see that your line has changed thickness
7. Click the Save and Close button when you are done adjusting your line the the desired thickness
8. You will now see your line in your document
Creating a Line with Paragraph Borders
The last method that I am going to cover is using paragraph borders to create a horizontal line and change its thickness.
We can create a custom format for paragraphs that will separate every paragraph by a line. We have complete control over how thick the line appears, which makes this a great method.
Here are the steps to do this:
1. Open your file and in the top menu select Format>Paragraph styles>Borders and shading
2. Under the Position settings select Between border
3. Navigate to the Border with section and select the dropdown. From here you can select a number corresponding to how thick you want your line. You can also control the color and formatting of your line, whether you want a solid line or a dashed line by selecting the settings here
4. Select Apply when you are finished setting up your line
5. Now when you return to your file and press the Return button on your keyboard it will create a line with the thickness that you set in the previous step
Closing Thoughts
As with anything in Google Docs, there are many different ways to adjust the thickness of a line, but ultimately it depends on how the line was created.
By now you have seen several different methods of creating a customizing your line. I always recommend that as you are learning, you try each method.
Eventually, you will find that you prefer one method over another.
More Google Docs Tutorials:
How to Change Letter and Line Spacing
How to Underline