Under Indentation, set Special to 'First line' and By to 0.5'. Simply put the cursor on the line where you're going to start typing, then go the Home tab in the ribbon and click Paragraph to bring up the paragraph formatting dialog box.Īs you can see in the accompanying graphic, there are two important settings you'll want to apply to your paragraph.

In Word 2010, you can do this very easily before you even start to type the first paragraph of your story. One of these rules should be that the first line of each paragraph gets automatically indented half an inch. This means defining a set of formatting rules that get applied to all paragraphs in your document. It's better to apply paragraph formatting to your document. Using the tab key inserts an actual invisible tab character into your text, which can mess up the formatting later when your publisher tries to reformat your document for publication. You can still use the tab key in your word processor, but that's not the best way to indent a paragraph.

'Tab' is short for 'tabular,' because tab stops were useful for helping a typist arrange figures in tables. You could hit the space bar five times at the start of your first line, or you could set up a tab stop half an inch in from your left margin and just hit the tab key once. Back in the Stone Age, when we still used typewriters, there were two ways to indent a paragraph.

Setting tabs in word 2010 starter