How to Indent in Google Sheets

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.

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.

How to indent in Google Sheets using Custom Number Formatting

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.

1. Open the Google Sheets file in which you want to indent the text.
2. Choose the cells you want to indent.
3. Next, press and hold CTRL on Windows and Command on Mac and select multiple cells with the cursor. Note: you can do this even for cells that are non-contiguous, meaning they don’t share a border.

4. While holding the selected cells, click on the ‘Format’ tab.

5. Select ‘Number’ (Even though the data in the cell isn’t numbers, you still need to choose this option because it contains the custom format option).
6. Select the ‘Custom number format’ at the bottom of the menu.

7. In the Custom number formats dialog box, enter a blank space for each desired indented space, followed by the symbol @. For example, ‘ @’.

8. Click on ‘Apply’.

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.

How to apply the same indent to additional cells by pasting formatting

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:

1. Copy the cells in which you have already applied the indentation. Drag the cursor over the cells you want to copy > right-click > select Copy. Or select the cells by dragging the cursor, or press and hold CTRL on Windows and Command on Mac, and go to Edit > Copy in the toolbar.
2. Then select the cells where you want to apply the indentation formatting and paste the formatting you copied before by navigating to Edit > Paste special > Format only. Or use the keyboard shortcut Command + Option + V.

✔ ️ Also explore how to group rows and columns in Google Sheets.

How to indent in Google Sheets by adding a column

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:

1. Select the column where you want to apply the indentation.
2. Then, insert a column to the left of the selected column. Click on the column label at the top of the selected column, right-click and select ‘Insert 1 left’.
3. Resize the left column to the desired amount of indentation by clicking the right border of the column border and dragging it left or right.
4. Now, cut and paste the data that you don’t want to be indented into the left column. Press CTRL + X on Windows or Command + X on Mac to cut cells and then paste them in the left column by pressing CTRL + V on Windows and Command + V on Mac.

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.