In addition to borders, shading, and patterns, you can also specify alignment and indentation for your paragraphs. To do this, place your cursor in the paragraph you want to indent. (You can also select multiple paragraphs or even a whole document.) Then, click the Format menu and click Paragraph. You’ll see the following window appear:

In the figure above, we’ve circled the section that applies to alignment in blue. You can use the first drop-down menu to choose whether you want this paragraph to be aligned to the left, right, or centre. You can also choose justified as an alignment choice; this will space text out to create an even edge along the left and right side of the page. We’re going to skip the next option in the alignment section for now as it deals with outlines; we’ll talk about outlines in the Advanced section.

You can also see that our indentation options are circled in red in the sample above. An indentation is how far the text is from a margin. You can use the text boxes on the left hand side to create simple left or right indents. Here are some samples:

The next set of options lets us set special indents. A first line indent will indent only the first line of a paragraph, while a hanging line indent will indent all lines of the paragraph but the first. After you’ve chosen one of these options, you can set how far the indent will be using the text box beside the drop-down menu.

You can also combine left, right, and special indents, like this:

Of course, you can combine alignment with indents as well.

Once you’re done setting alignment and indent options, click OK to apply them or cancel to discard your changes.