A while back, I could make single-spaced reports using Word. Now everything comes out double-spaced although ...

If you're using Word 2007, my experience has been that lots of stuff on the menu bars don't do much of anything useful, and even less often do what anyone but an idiot would expect.

Since Office 2007 obliterated all the useful menus, it's simpler just to use the "quick keys" (which are hidden in 2007 but easy to find in earlier versions). The quick keys still mostly work in all versions:

Hit Alt-o, P

The Alt o gets a Format menu which is not visible in Word 2007 but should pop up in earlier versions, P tells it you want the Paragraph format menu, and when you hit the P in Word 2007 you should see a menu.

On the "Indents and Spacing" tab you should find a box where you can select single or double (or other) line spacings. If you select "Exactly" in the box, you can use the roller arrows to put a specific number of "points" of separation between lines, or just type a number in the box. This might be thought of as getting "single spaced lines where the lines actually are a different distance apart."

You also will find a place to set "space before" and "space after." This lets you have single spaced lines but paragraphs separated by some different spacing. Set both of those to zero if you really want everything all cramped together.

There are additional settings in Word's Tools|Options or Tools|Customize menus (old fashioned versions where there are lots of useful things) - which in Word 2007 is at COWSPLAT "Word Options" where there are lots fewer things you can do.

John