I've written a cover letter that has
several paragraphs and to make each
paragraph stand out just a little more I
want to add a first line indent the
easiest way to do this is to place your
cursor also known as 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 a left indent marker and then all
the way on the other side the right
indent marker we can move them to create
various types of indents they don't
affect the whole document though just
the parts that are selected so let's
select all of these paragraphs now click
and drag the first line indent marker as
the marker moves a blue guideline
extends from the ruler
the right indent is useful if you want
to make the paragraph narrower
and finally the left indent marker can
be used to move all of the lines at the
same time you can also adjust the left
indent using the buttons on the toolbar
these will increase or decrease the
indent in one half inch increments but
for this letter I want a more
traditional look so I'm just going to do
a first line indent of one quarter 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 up 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 that works pretty well but
I'd like to have a little more control
over exactly how the text lines up 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
just like with indents tab stops only
apply to selected text so select all of
the text you want to include in your tab
stop next click the ruler where you'd
like the tab stop to be you can choose
to align your text to the left center or
right of the tab stop in this example
we're going to align our text to the
left
now to align the dates we want to add
just one tab before each date and they
will jump to the new tab stop
if there are more things you'd like to
align you can add more tab stops
and to remove them just drag them off
the ruler and they'll disappear
I think that looks a lot better now and
I think having everything lined up gives
it a neater more professional appearance
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