In continuation with paragraph formatting in our word tutorials, we shall look at indentation and text alignment in Microsoft Word.
Indentation is mostly used to set off block quotations in a document. In this case, either the left or both left and right margins will be set off.
Alignment is a command that specifies the extent a paragraph's content covers the left and right margins. When formatting paragraphs, indentation, and text alignment are important because they make documents presentable.
Applying indentation
You can indent the first line of every paragraph in your document or create a hanging indent as in endnotes.
You can indent a paragraph by using the following commands.
• increase and decrease indent commands on the Paragraph group. To achieve this, click the increase indent icon on the paragraph group to increase the indent in a selected paragraph. OR click the decrease indent icons to decrease the indent in a selected paragraph.
• You can also use the indent triangle points on the horizontal ruler in your Word document. When you click and drag the triangles on the ruler, you create an indentation point within a selected paragraph. If you drag the box under the left indent triangle, you will set both indents together. If you drag the top-left triangle, you set an indent for the first line of the paragraph like this.
Aligning paragraphs
There are four kinds of paragraph alignment that you can apply to a word document, they include;
• Left alignment: which makes lines in a selected paragraph flush on the left margin and shabby on the right margin.
• Right alignment: which makes lines in a selected paragraph flush on the right and ragged on the left margin.
• Center alignment: which centers lines in a selected paragraph and makes left and right margins to be shabby.
• Justify alignment: which makes lines in a selected paragraph flush on the left and right margins. To achieve this, spaces are created within letters and words in lines of a paragraph.
