

To indent with a formula, we will use the ARRAYFORMULA function with the & operator / ampersand, to tell Google Sheets to add three spaces before the text in a specified column, like this =ARRAYFORMULA(" "&A2:A) You can copy and paste the indented list generated by the formula in another place, by pressing Ctrl + C to copy, and then pressing Ctrl + Shift + V to paste values only, which will transfer only the values and not the formatting or formulas. This method adds spaces before your text by using a formula, which means that in one column you'll have text that is not indented, and in another column you'll have text that is indented by a formula. If you want, you can also indent text with a formula in Google Sheets. Your text entries / values within the cells remain the same as they were at their core, but Google Sheets just changes the visual formatting. This method is great for indenting text that has already been entered into the cells, and will also indent new text that is entered within the range where you changed the formatting.Īnother great thing is that if you click on one of the indented cells, you'll see that in the formula bar the spaces do not appear before the text. To do this, in the field that says "Custom number format", type three spaces and then type an symbol, as shown in the image below (Notice that the symbol is shifted three spaces to the right, because three space characters were typed before the symbol.Īs you can see in the image below, after applying the custom number formatting as described above, the items in the task list have been indented. In this case we are going to indicate that we want three spaces to appear before our text, or in other words that we want to indent our text by three spaces. Here you can customize how you want your data to be formatted. Select the cell or range of cells that you want to indentĪs shown below, on the top toolbar menu, there is a button that says "123", click this to open the "More formats" menuĪt the bottom of the menu, click "Custom number format"Īs shown below, the "Custom number formats" menu will pop up. The best way to indent in Google Sheets, is to use custom number formatting, which will automatically indent your text. Indent with custom number formatting in Google Sheets See below for methods that make it easier to automatically indent existing text. You can see in the image below that the text is indented within the cell, and that there are spaces shown in the formula bar (highlighted).īut this method is very basic. Simply click on a new cell, and tap the space key three times before typing. Press the space key three times before typing to indent new text entries.


This works well when you are only typing a couple of things that you want to indent quickly. If you want, you can indent text manually in Google Sheets by manually typing spaces before entering text. Indent manually by typing spaces in Google Sheets See below for detailed examples that show multiple ways to indent in Google Sheets.
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In other words Google Sheets will automatically indent the text with the custom number formatting described above.Ĭlick here to get your free Google Sheets cheat sheet (Type three spaces followed by an symbol)Īfter following the steps above, Google sheets will automatically put three spaces before any text that is entered into the range that you applied the formatting to. In the field that says "Custom number format", type three spaces (tap space bar three times), and then type an symbol.Click "Custom number format" (A menu will pop up).On the top toolbar, click the "More formats" menu (Button that says "123").Select the cell / range of cells that you want to indent.To indent in Google Sheets, follow these steps: Here are the general instructions for indenting in Google Sheets, but further below I will go over the varying methods in detail, with examples. I will show you multiple ways to indent inside of the cell, and I'll also show you other ways to indent by using columns in your sheet. Do you have text that you need to indent in your Google spreadsheet? There are several ways that you can indent in Google Sheets, and in this lesson I am going to show you all of them.
