Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter! Custom indentation. This has the added bonus of letting you indent text by a custom amount. The Decrease Indent button, meanwhile, does the exact opposite.Īlternatively, go to Layout > Paragraph on the ribbon and adjust the values in the left and right indent boxes as required. The Increase Indent button adds a 0.5” (1.27cm) indent at the left margin for the entire paragraph (not just the first line). This includes the Paragraph section of the Home tab, where you will find Increase Indent and Decrease Indent buttons. You can find the basic indentation options in Microsoft Word on the main ribbon.

But for more control over text indentation in your document, read on. If all you want to do is begin each paragraph with a half-inch indent, this is fine. It also automatically formats the text so that subsequent paragraphs have a first-line indent. In Microsoft Word, this adds a 0.5” (1.27cm) indent at the left margin. One simple way to indent text is to place the cursor at the start of a paragraph and hit the tab key on your keyboard. To help out, then, we’ve prepared this complete guide on how to indent text in a document. But there are many extra options that you may miss if you’re not already a confident Microsoft Word user. Wider text blocks should have bigger indents.Microsoft Word: How to Indent Text in a Documentįormatting text in MS Word is both pleasingly simple and annoyingly complicated. For instance, narrow text blocks (3″ or less) should have first-line indents toward the low end of this range. (Recall that there are 72 points to an inch, so this works out to 0.17–0.67″.)īut use your judgment-consider the width of the text block when setting the first-line indent. So a paragraph set in 12 point should have a first-line indent of 12–48 points.

It should be no bigger than four times the point size, or else the first line will seem disconnected from the left edge.

Typically, a first-line indent should be no smaller than the current point size, or else it’ll be hard to notice. And vice versa.Ī first-line indent on the first paragraph of any text is optional, because it’s obvious where the paragraph starts. If you use a first-line indent on a paragraph, don’t use space between. The other common way is with space between paragraphs.įirst-line indents and space between paragraphs have the same relationship as belts and suspenders. First-line indents Between one and four times the point sizeĪ first-line indent is the most common way to signal the start of a new paragraph.

How to first line indent in word 2016