Indents

Indents are spaces between content and the margin.

You can create indents pressing the Tab key and remove them by deleting them with backspace.

You can also adjust indents with indent markers on the ruler tool. To enable to the ruler go to View > Show and check Ruler. Below we'll look at different uses

Paragraphs and indents

With the insertion point on the paragraph, on the ruler above the page you'll see the indent markers aligned together like this:

Here's what each of the indent markers do when working with paragraphs:

	First line indent - Controls where the first line of the pargraph begins.
	Hanging Indent - Controls where all lines except the first line begin.
	Left Indent - Moves both the above indents together, shifting the entire paragraph left or right.

Lists and indents

When it comes to bullet and number lists, the indent markers work slightly differently. They're not aligned like in paragraphs and this is to do with the different functions they have for lists.

	First line indent - Controls where bullet/number begins.
	Hanging Indent - Controls where the text begins after the bullet.
	Left Indent - Moves both the above indents together, shifting both the bullet/number and line/paragraph left or right.

Here's a simple example adjusting the bullet and spacing on a single sub-bullet. Typically you'd adjust all the sub-bullets together, in which case you'd select them all first then drag the indent markers as needed.

Table lists and indents

If you apply a bullet/number list in a table it'll look something like this below. Word's default spacing jutting out from the column border like that isn't exactly useful when you're typically limited for space in columns, but you can fix this up using the indent markers:

Since it's a list the indent markers will work based on that, but ebcause we're inside a table there's another marker called a Column boundary marker to be aware of too:

	First line indent - Controls where bullet/number begins.
	Hanging Indent - Controls where the text begins after the bullet/number.
	Left Indent - Moves both the above indents together, shifting both the bullet/number and line/paragraph left or right.
	Column boundary marker - Marks the position of a column border in a multi-column table, you can also drag this to adjust the column width.

Here's a trick to neaten up bullets/numbers in lists:

Adjust the First line indent dragging it right to reduce the space between the bullet/number and the content, then drag the Left indent to the left to bring everything closer to the column border. Take a look:

The column boundary marker can be dragged to adjust the column border as well: