I've written a letter that has several paragraphs, and to make each paragraph stand out just
a little more, I want to add a first line indent.
Before you add an indent, you may want to go to the View tab and make sure the Ruler
is displayed, since it makes it easier to customize your indents.
To create a first line indent, you can just place the insertion point at the beginning
of a paragraph and then press the Tab key.
You may have noticed that when I did this, this little marker on the Ruler moved forward
1/2 inch.
This is the First Line Indent marker.
There's also the Hanging Indent marker, the Left Indent marker just below that, and the
Right Indent marker.
We can move them to create various types of indents.
They don't affect the whole document, just the parts that are selected, so let's select
all of these paragraphs.
Now, drag the First Line Indent marker.
We can also create a Hanging Indent, which moves all of the lines except the first line.
The Left Indent will move all of the lines at the same, and the Right Indent is useful
if you want to make the paragraph narrower.
But for this letter, I need a more traditional look, so I'm just going to do a first line
indent of 1/4 inch.
Indents are a good way to keep things lined up in your document, but for more complex
documents, such as resumes, they're not always enough.
I'd really like all of these dates to line.
I could just use spaces, but it's going to be difficult or impossible to get them to
line up exactly.
So I'll need to use tabs.
If I place the insertion point right before the text I want to align, and then press the
Tab key, it's going to jump forward in half-inch increments.
It's much easier to align these dates this way.
If you go to the Home tab and click the Show/Hide command, you'll be able to see the tabs, and
they show up as these little arrows.
You can delete them by pressing the backspace key.
That works pretty well, but I'd like to have a little more control over exactly how the
text lines.
I think a tab stop is exactly what we need here.
Tab stops tell the text exactly where to line up, so you're not limited to half-inch increments.
On the left side of the screen is the tab selector.
If you click it, it will cycle through all of the different types of tab stops that determine
whether the text is left aligned, centered, right aligned, or aligned at the decimal point
if you're using numbers.
I'm going to select the Right Tab.
Just like with indents, tab stops only apply to the selected paragraph, so select all of
the ones that need tab stops.
Then, click on the bottom edge of the Ruler where you'd like the tab stop to be.
You can add more than one if you need to, and you can remove them by just dragging them
off the Ruler.
Now, to align the dates, we want to add just one tab before each year, and they will jump
to the new tab stop.
Generally, you'll need to add one tab for each tab stop.
You can also move existing tab stops.
Make sure your text is selected, and then move the tab stop to the left or right.
But be sure to allow plenty of space for the text.
If I move the tab stop too far to the left, the dates won't have enough room, so they
won't line up correctly.
This document looks a lot better now, and I think having everything lined up gives it
a neater, more professional appearance.