How to Indent in Google Sheets

How to Indent in Google Sheets

Google Sheets offers various methods to enhance the visual structure of your data through text indentation. There are three effective methods, each tailored for different use cases. Despite the absence of a dedicated indent button, you can achieve professional-looking indentation effortlessly.

• Step 1: Select the cells to indent

  Select the cells within your spreadsheet that require indentation. Google Sheets allows the selection of multiple cells, even if they are not adjacent, by holding down the Ctrl key (Windows) or the Command key (Mac) while making your selections. For illustrative purposes, we will select cells corresponding to a sub-category in our dataset.

• Step 2: Navigate to ‘Format’ > ‘Number’ > ‘Custom number format’

  Navigate to the ‘Format’ option located in the top toolbar which will display a dropdown menu, from which you should select ‘Number.’ Subsequently, a new menu will appear, directing you to the ‘Custom number format’ option situated at the bottom.

• Step 3: Input the indent parameters

  Upon selecting ‘Custom number format,’ a dialog box will emerge. Within this box, input three spaces followed by the ‘@’ symbol into the field labeled ‘Custom number format.’ It’s crucial to note that while the ‘@’ symbol won’t visibly alter your data, the preceding spaces will serve as the indentation.

• Step 4: Apply the indentation

  Click on the ‘Apply’ button to implement the indentation on the cells you previously selected. Although the actual data content remains unchanged, this modification adjusts the visual representation by adding the desired indentation.

• Applying indentation to an entire column

  In certain scenarios, you may find it necessary to apply indentation uniformly across all cells in a column. Google Sheets facilitates this by allowing you to select an entire column simply by clicking on the column’s reference header, effectively applying the format changes to every cell within that column.