How to Do Hanging Indent on Word?- 2 Easy Methods
Note: (This guide on how to do Hanging Indent on Word is suitable for all Microsoft Word versions, including Office 365)
Tired of hitting the Tab button every time you want to adjust the starting of a paragraph or while breaking it down?
Microsoft provides the perfect solution in the form of Indents and Spacing. You can use the indents option to differentiate the content structure, hence putting out reader-friendly content.
If you haven’t used any indentation in your writing so far, there are distinctive types of indents available in Word apart from the ones you’re familiar with.
In this article, I will show you how to do hanging indent on Word using two different methods.
You’ll learn:
- What Is the Use of Indent in Microsoft Word?
- Types of Indentation Available in Word
- How to Do Hanging Indent on Word Documents – Different Ways
Related Reads:
How to Insert a Calendar in Word? 3 Easy Methods
How to Create Table of Contents in Word? A Simple Guide
How to Add Line Numbers in Word? A Step-by-Step Guide
What Is the Use of Indent in Microsoft Word?
If you are a writer who likes presenting content in the form of blogs and articles to your audience, it is essential to make them guess the outline of the post at a glance. This is where the indentation and spacing of the blog make a big difference.
Ensuring clarity and continuity from one paragraph to the other requires a significant difference between them. Without breaks between paragraphs, the reader gets lost in the content, eventually skipping the blog’s core message.
Types of Indentation Available in Word
Each indent serves a specific purpose to enhance the readability of your content. The different types of indentation available in Word are:
- First Line indent
- Hanging indent
- Left indent
- Right indent
In a hanging indent, the alignment of the paragraph’s first line remains unchanged, while the consecutive lines are indented. You might be familiar with the first line indent, as it is widely followed in newsletters and magazines; hanging indent does the exact opposite.
How to Do Hanging Indent on Word Documents – Different Ways
Create a new blank document and write some paragraphs to perform the following steps in hanging indent. You can apply the hanging indent through the methods we will cover in this article.
For this tutorial, let us focus on two simple and quick approaches:
- Hanging indent using the paragraph settings from the Home tab.
- Hanging indent using right-click on the mouse.
You can also access the paragraph options from the Layout menu, similar to the method mentioned above. Consider the following sample document. Let us use the above methods for separate paragraphs to perform the indent alignment.
By default, every line of a paragraph is aligned without any difference between each other. To signify the paragraphs, you should use a hard Enter.
Using the Paragraph Settings from the Home Tab
This method will apply the hanging indent to the first paragraph using the paragraph options under the Home menu.
- Select the paragraph you want to indent by dragging using the mouse or the navigation arrows and holding the Shift key.
- Go to the Home menu and click on the extension icon to expand paragraph settings near the paragraph section.
- The paragraph settings dialog box appears. Go to the Indentation section, and click on the Special dropdown box.
- Choose the Hanging option from the list displayed. Additionally, you can customize the margin spacing value using the increment By box.
- Once you have entered the value for indent spacing or applied the default value of 1.27cm, click Ok to apply the hanging indent to the selected paragraph.
- The hanging indent is applied to the paragraph, and the result is displayed in the following image.
In this method, we saw how to do hanging indent on Word using the paragraph settings under the Home menu.
Also Read:
How to Save a Word Document? 3 Useful Ways
How to Merge Word Documents? – 3 Easy Methods
How to Change Orientation of One Page in Word? 3 Easy Ways
Using Right-Click on the Mouse
Let us now see how to do hanging indent on Word using the mouse. We will choose the second paragraph and add an indent for this instance.
- Select the paragraph you want to indent by dragging with the mouse or using the arrow key and holding the Shift key.
- Right-click on the mouse to open the list of quick formatting options. Select the paragraph options from the list displayed.
- The paragraph options dialog box opens. You will find different paragraph formatting options, like alignment, indentation, and spacing options.
- Under the Indentation section, the default indent setting is set to ‘none.’ Click on the dropdown box near the Special.
- Choose the hanging indent option from the dropdown box to indent the selected paragraph and hit OK.
- If you have a specific margin value to be followed, assign that value in the indentation ‘By’ section.
The final result is displayed in the image above. Thus we saw how to do hanging indent on Word using the mouse in this method.
Suggested Reads:
How to Wrap Text in Word? 6 Wrap Text Options Explained
How to Track Changes in Word? A Step-by-Step Guide
How to Double Space in Word? 4 Easy Ways
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you create a hanging indent in Word?
To create a hanging indent, select the paragraph and use the following instructions.
Home tab→Paragraph Settings→Special→Hanging→Ok.
Alternatively, you can access the paragraph options dialog box from the Layout tab or right-click on the mouse.
What is the margin spacing for a hanging indent?
As set by Microsoft, the default spacing of hanging indent from the margin is 0.5 inches from the left margin. You can modify the margin value by entering a value in the ‘indentation by’ box from paragraph options.
What is the use of hanging indents in paragraphs?
Hanging indents, often called second-line indents, represent a person’s work citations and an author’s bibliography. They differentiate the breaks in a paragraph into readable information.
Closing Thoughts
This article taught us how to do hanging indent on Word in two effective ways. Try coming up with various ideas to enhance the overall delivery of your content with different indent types. Though the hanging indent is generally used in the bibliography and citation of an author, you can expand the indented format to explain your narrative through your paragraphs better.
For more such tutorials, please visit our free resources section for high-quality MS Word or Excel guides.
Ready to dive deep into Excel? Click here for advanced Excel courses with in-depth training modules.
Simon Sez IT has taught Excel and other business software for over ten years. You can access 150+ IT training courses for a low monthly fee.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
