Indentation and line spacing are two important elements that you can manage in your PowerPoint
presentation that can change the way text on a slide appears.
When used wisely, both can have a significant impact on the look of your slides.
In an earlier lesson, we learned how to insert a bulleted and numbered list, and format the
bullet in various ways. In addition to creating a one level list such
as this one, PowerPoint gives you the ability to create an indented or subordinate list
within a list. On slide 4, at the very bottom we have an
indented list here with Print, TV & Online.
On slide 10 we have a list of types of paid and unpaid leave.
I want to add some information that lets employees know the number of sick days they earn, I
could type it here like this or I could add it to the bulleted list beneath Sick.
It would make sense to indent this bullet so it appears indented beneath Sick leave.
To create an indented list, place the cursor at the start of the line that you want to
indent. Then on the Home tab, in the Paragraph group,
click Increase List Level. And now you can see that this indents the
text and bullet. If you click the Increase List Level command
again, the bullet and text will indent even further.
And you can continue to do this and see that there are multiple list levels.
To move text back to a less indented level in the list, place the cursor at the start
of the line, and click Decrease List Level. You can do the same thing here for vacation.
Just place the cursor at the start of the line that you want to indent and click the
Increase List Level command. Now, while you are on the indented list, if
you press Enter, the new bullet will appear as part of the indented list.
A common example of changing an indent is when you want to adjust the space between
a bullet in a list and the text that goes with it.
You may want to add more space between the bullet and text, or have less space.
To do this, you'll need the PowerPoint ruler. It is the easiest way to adjust the indents.
If your ruler is not active, select the View tab, and then click the Ruler check box in
the Show/Hide group. There are three different markers that appear
on the ruler for the selected text box. This is the first line indent marker, it kind
of looks like an upside down triangle. It indicates the position of the actual bullet.
To change the position of the bullet, place the cursor in the line of text connected with
the bullet you want to move or for multiple bullets, select the text.
Now, just click and drag the first-line indent marker to change the position of the bullet.
And then release the mouse button at the desired location.
As you can see, you can move the bullet closer or farther away from the text.
I'm actually going to put this back to the original position.
This triangle is the hanging indent marker. It indicates the position of the line of text.
To change the position of the text, we just need to place our cursor in the line we want
to change, or select the lines. Then, click and drag the hanging indent marker.
Now just release the mouse button. See how easy that was? Now, this rectangle
beneath the hanging indent marker is the left indent marker.
It adjusts both the first line and hanging indent markers at the same time and maintains
the current spacing. It shows the indent position of text in the
list. To move the bullet and text at the same time
and maintain the relationship between them, just click and drag the rectangle, and release
it at the desired location. See how the markers moved at the same time
on the ruler? Check out the second part of this lesson to learn more about indentation
and line spacing.