[Music]
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 the easiest way
to do this is to 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
often dent will move all of the lines at
the same time
and the right indent is useful if you
want to make the paragraph narrower
but for this letter I want a more
traditional look so I'm just going to do
a first line indent of 1/4 of an 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 and half-inch increments
it's much easier to align the dates this
way
if you click the show/hide command
you'll be able to see the tabs and they
show up as these little arrows and 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 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 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 will be 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 tap stops only
apply to the selected paragraph so
select all of the paragraphs that need
tap stops then click on the bottom edge
of the ruler where you like the tap stop
to be
now to align the dates we want to add
just one tab before each date and they
will jump to the new tab stop
generally you'll need to add one tab for
each tab stop
if there are more things that you'd like
to align you can add more tab stops and
to remove them just track them off the
ruler and they'll disappear
if you select the text again you can
move the tab stop
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
I think this looks a lot better now and
I think having everything lined up gives
it a neater more professional appearance
like what you just saw rate it at a
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