Understanding Cell Indenting

When you think of indenting information, you normally think of a word processor. It is not unusual to indent paragraphs or specific lines of information on the screen. Excel, while definitely not a word processor, allows you to easily indent information within a cell.

To set the indent to be used in a cell, follow these steps:

1. Select the cells you want to format.
2. Choose Cells from the Format menu. Excel displays the Format Cells dialog box. (To display the Format Cells dialog box if you are using Excel 2007, display the Home tab of the ribbon and click the small icon at the bottom-right of the Alignment group.)
3. Make sure the Alignment tab is selected. (Click here to see a related figure.)
4. Using the Indent control, specify the number of characters by which the cell contents should be indented. You can pick any whole number between 0 and 15.
5. Click on OK.

Each number of indent moves the contents of the cell about one character width to the right. (There goes that strange character measurement system in Excel again.) You can also control the indentation of cell contents by using the two indent tools on the Formatting toolbar. Each click of a tool moves the cell contents one position to the left or right.

If you have set up a cell so that text wraps within the cell, then indentation affects all the lines of text within the cell—not just the first line.