Written by Ivana Google Workplace / Sheets
You can indent text in Google Sheets in 2 ways:
Google Sheets is a powerful online spreadsheet application that offers many features for organizing, manipulating, and visualizing data. One useful feature is the ability to indent cells. This can be helpful for creating lists or outlining information.
Keep reading to find out how to indent in Google Sheets.
Formatting your Google Sheets document can make your data easier to read and more appealing.
While Sheets has amazing formatting and aligning options, it doesn’t have a dedicated indentation option for text or data. Nevertheless, there are several workarounds you can use to indent text in Google Sheets, as well as numbers and cells.
Below, we are going to cover each workaround solution separately.
The custom number formatting controls how we see text or a value within a Google Sheets cell. This option is mostly used for formatting numbers. It can also be useful for indenting text in cells with a custom format.
This is how to indent text in a cell by using custom number formatting.
The text in the selected cells will be indented.
If you need more indentation, simply increase the number of spaces in front of the '@' symbol.
Note: When you add a @ symbol in the formatting, this causes the text in the cell to display the indent in the cell. If you only add a blank space by pressing the ‘Space’ key or pressing the Tab key without using the '@' symbol, nothing will change in the text. And the cell.
If you use Google Sheets frequently, it might help to check out how to use Google Sheets special characters.
If you want to indent the text in more cells, you can follow the steps above to use the custom number formatting. However, there is also a shortcut that helps you in adding indentation faster.
You just copy the formatting from the cells where you have already applied the indentation. Here’s how to do it:
✔ ️ Also explore how to group rows and columns in Google Sheets.
The second method you can use to indent text in Google Sheets is by using two columns where the non-indented text goes in the left column, and the indented text stays in the right column.
This method is a bit more extensive and may look confusing at first, but once you get the hang of it, managing your Google Sheets will be much easier.
This is the step-by-step guide on how to add indentation with a second column:
Repeat the last step to move all cells with the desired text to the left column. Check out also how to color alternate rows and columns in Google Sheets.
The result looks like the text in the second column is indented. But in reality, there's another column to the left of the indented text.
If you want to check out more Google Sheets tips, read how to sort Google Sheets by date.