How can I give a paragraph a negative top margin in Word 2010?

Solution 1:

What I finally found that seems to work reasonably well is setting the line spacing to an exact value.

Specifically, change Paragraph --> Indents and Spacing --> Line spacing from Single to Exactly and set At to an explicit point size. If you get small enough, you may need to add some Spacing After to make sure characters like lower-case "j" and "y" don't get clipped.

For example, I now have a paragraph style with 28 pt Segoe UI font where I set the line spacing to exactly 28 pt and the spacing after to 6 pt. This gets it very close to the paragraph right above it while still leaving a sizable margin below and plenty of room for "j" and "y" characters.