Spacing emergency

[Guillermo Raffo]

Hi, everyone. 

Sorry if I plunge into posting when I have yet ro receive a single message
from this list, but I've been trying to solve a problem for hours and can't
figure it out:

It regards spacing between paragraphs. How do I add a space between them? It
seems that I should be able to do this through the "Spacing" pop-up menu in
the ruler, but tweaking those paragraph settings change nothing in my
selected text.

Perhaps this has to do with the fact that every paragraph is an item? Should
I be inserting a space between *rows*? Can this be done?

Incidentally (and related), I often want to have several paragraphs as part
of the same row and I don't know how to do that either.

Any help will be greatly appreciated,

H