You can probably guess what these do from their names. Decrease Indent (left) and Increase Indent (right). Here, you will find two buttons: Decrease Indent and Increase Indent. The most basic options for paragraph spacing can be found in the Paragraph section of the Home tab. You can then apply them to an entire paragraph (or multiple paragraphs) to quickly format larger passages of text. These can be accessed via the main ribbon in Microsoft Word. However, if you need to indent more than one line, you should use the indentation options instead. This will add a 1.27cm (0.5”) indent at the start of the line. If you simply want to indent a single line of text, you can place the cursor at the beginning of the line and hit the tab key. This can be very useful, especially for block quotes in an essay or report.īut how do you format text indentation in Word? And when should you use it? Let us explain. The indentation options in Microsoft Word allow you to set a passage of text apart from the rest of the document.