The first line indent tab refers to the indent that is applied to the first line of text in a paragraph.

For example, you could add a bar tab to the above document to get the following: The careful use of bar tabs can make your content a bit easier to understand. The numbers to the right and left of the decimal point may not line up, but the decimal points themselves are all ligned up.Ī bar tab doesn’t actually position the text you type, it merely inserts a vertical bar at the tab position. Note that the decimal points are all lined up to an imaginary vertical line running directly below the tab stop: It’s a similar story with the other tabs. You can see that text underneath the left tab is left aligned to the vertical line running underneath that tab.

The following image shows how the left tab, centre tab and right tab work: Let’s add some tabs, and see how our text reacts to them. If you set tabs only in the first paragraph, for example, they won’t affect the text in any other paragraph. It’s important to remember that the tabs you set affect only the paragraph where the cursor is, or the paragraphs you select when you set the tabs. Now when you press the tab key, the cursor will jump to the next tab. You can add as many tabs as you want to the ruler: just point and click. Ensure that you have the tab type set correctly on the tab selector (far left) and then just click on the ruler. Inserting a tab stop is as easy as clicking on the ruler. Centre and right tabs produce centre and right aligned text, which is pretty straightforward. The most popular tab is the left tab, and that creates left aligned text. Tabs don’t just set the location that text is displayed. The tab type selection cycles round in the following sequence: There are several different tab types available to us, and we can change to the next one by clicking the selector button. Hovering over the tab selector will display the current tab type in a tooltip. This button controls what kind of tab you will set when you click on the ruler. By default, it will initially look like an ‘L’. To the far left of the ruler, you should see the tab selector button. If you can’t see a ruler running acros the top of your workspace, click View > Show > Ruler (ensure that that box is checked). It is on the ruler that you will be setting tabs. When setting tabs, you’ll need to display the ruler along the top edge of your document. It’s usually better to specify precisely where you want your text to start after you press the tab key, so you get the layout you want. This might suit your needs in a few cases, but probably won’t in most. Without any tabs added to a document, each press of the tab key moves the cursor along by one inch.

Whatever you do, don’t do that! If you do that on several lines of text, the odds of getting your text to line up properly are pretty slim. Many people press the space bar several times to indent text. To use tabs effectively, it’s important to understand the basics before you make a hash of things! Read on… However, using them can give you a great deal of flexibility when laying out your document for maximum readability. Tabs in Microsoft Word are the source of much confusion for many users.

How to set tabs in word 10