Align paragraphs

Let me first explain what a paragraph is in Word.
After you type all the text and then press the Enter key on your keyboard this automatically becomes a paragraph.
This means that the title you typed, will also be treated as a paragraph by Word.

By default, text is left-aligned in Microsoft Word.
If we now want to align it differently, place the cursor anywhere in the paragraph, and click the button “Center”, “Right”, or “Justified”.
The “Justified” is usually used in newspapers or magazines, and gives both the left and the right side of our text a straight alignment.
In order to do this, Word will add extra spaces between words.
The “Justify” will therefore have little use if our paragraph consists only of one line, such as our title.

All these buttons can be found in the group “Paragraph” in the ribbon, under the tab “Home”.

Indent paragraphs

In Word, we have several ways to indent text.
Whichever way you choose, you first place your cursor in the paragraph you want to indent.
The first way is by using the buttons “Decrease Indent” and “Increase Indent” in the ribbon, under the tab “Home”.
Each time you click the “Increase Indent” button, the indentation of the paragraph increases by 1.25 cm.
Same for the “Decrease Indent”, every time you click this button the indent will be decreased by 1.25 cm.

A second way is by using the buttons that we find at the top right of the horizontal ruler.
Click and drag buttons to the desired position.
The top button, will only indent the first line of our paragraph.
The middle button, “hanging indent”, will indent all lines except the first line of our paragraph.
And the bottom button will indent the entire paragraph.

On the right side of our ruler, we have the button “Right Indent” which we can use to indent the paragraph to the right.
 

A third way is to click on the downward pointing arrow next to the group “Paragraph”.
This opens the dialog “Paragraph”.

In this dialog we can enter all the settings for our paragraph.
The alignment, different options for the indent, the distance between paragraphs, and the distance between the lines.
So if you wish to change all the settings for your paragraph (s) at once, this is the place to be.

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