How to indent in Google Sheets (5 Methods)

in this video i'm going to show you how to indent in google sheets and this is going to be a pretty quick video because there's really one main way to do this but i'll quickly show you some other ways to indent other than the automatic method so first as you probably already know you can indent manually by manually typing spaces before what you type and so this works if you have just a few different items to indent so for example if i wanted to make a list of items starting here in cell a2 i would simply tap the space bar three times before i type my first item and then i would type an item and i would repeat this process as i type additional items but now let's go over a method where you can indent text in bulk and you can do it automatically to text that's already been entered without having to manually type spaces so here we're going to indent all of the items here in column b and so i'm going to select some of the cells in column b but i do not want to indent the header and then what we're going to do is use something that's called custom number formatting and so after i've selected the cells that i want to indent i'm going to click the more formats menu on the top toolbar which is the button that says one two three then i'm going to scroll down and then click custom number format now here in the field on top you can see that there's an at symbol and i'm simply going to click before the at symbol and then i'm going to hit the space bar three times to include three spaces before the at symbol and then i'm going to click apply and now you can see the google sheets has automatically indented the items in the list so that they display three spaces before each item and we were able to do this automatically and to multiple cells at once and any other items that we enter in the future are already going to be indented now another good thing to notice is that with this method here in the formula bar you can see that the spaces are not included in the actual values but they simply appear indented so what i just showed you with the custom number formatting is the best way to indent text in google sheets again the more formats menu then click custom formatting and include three spaces before the at symbol now real quickly let's go over a few different ways that you can indent if you if you ever have a case where you need to indent by using a formula you can do this as you can see here in column a we have text that is not indented and in column b we're using the array formula function to automatically indent the text that is in column a and so we're using array formula and then we're specifying that we want three spaces to be attached to column a if you want to learn more about the array formula function check out the video that i have linked in the description another way that you can indent is to use multiple columns such as here where we have a list of main items and then a list of sub items and as you can see here off to the right in columns d and e if you adjust the first column so that it's narrow the sub items in the next column are indented and the last way to indent which is actually very common is to use a narrow column on the left side of your sheet sometimes it feels like your data is too far over to the left and you want just a little bit of space and the easiest way to do this is to simply add a column to the left and you can do this by right clicking at the top of the column and then click insert one column left and then again adjust the width of the column so that it's very narrow and your data on the entire sheet will be indented slightly to the right i hope you liked this video if you do please like and subscribe and have a great day