It is true that in Word 2013 the nonbreaking space does not maintain the width of an ordinary space in a justified line. That doesn't mean that it 'doesn't work.' It is still keeping the text on either side of it from being separated at the end of a line, which is its purpose. In your situation, there are three solutions:. The correct way is to use a separate style for the unnumbered paragraph. In addition to the built in list styles (List, List Number, List Bullet) there is a series of List Continue styles with indents to match the corresponding numbered or bulleted levels.
For example, if you're using List Number, you can follow it with List Continue; List Number 2 is followed by List Continue 2, etc. This allows you to adjust the space between paragraphs more precisely than just using line breaks.
The quick-and-dirty way to keep a line ending in a line break from being justified is to insert a tab character at the end of the text. Another solutionĀ is to enable the Layout Option 'Don't expand character spaces on a line that ends with SHIFT-RETURN.'
A great tip submitted by Dominic P. Tremblay: Non-breaking space in Pages or Microsoft Word! A non-breaking space is very useful when typing a document and the automatic formatting chooses to cut the sentence at an undesired place.
This setting will be for the immediate document only. Discussion with the Word product team revealed that (as usual) they weren't aware that users were using nonbreaking spaces for this purpose. This is perhaps not a defensible use, but it is certainly defensible to want a non-expanding space between the initials of a person's name, between the month and day in a date, and so on. For that you do need to use U00A0 or another Unicode character to accomplish this task.
Microsoft MVP (Word) since 1999 Fairhope, Alabama USA http://ssbarnhill.com.