Leave the list item values as is in Column B.

Copy and paste the category cells in the column on the left (Column A in this example).

The size of this column will be the level of indentation you want in the data. This will insert one column to the left of the selected column.

Right-click and select ‘Insert 1 left’.

To do this, click on the top of the column label (where it says A)

Select the entire column which has the indentation (in this example, it’s column A).

Here are the steps to add indentation to list items: But it does offer the benefit of being super easy to manage once you have set it up.īelow is the data set where I want to indent the list items. This method may not be ideal for everyone as it requires you to split your list and put these into two separate columns. While this is my preferred method of adding indentation in Google Sheets, there is another (simple and out of the box) way of adding indentation to cells in Google Sheets. For example, if apart from the indentation, you also have applied a border and a background color to the cell, when you copy and paste the format of it to some other cell, the border and color would also be copied (along with the indentation). Note: When you copy a format from a cell in Google Sheets, it copies the entire format. That’s it! This will copy the format from the copied cell and apply it to the selected cell.

In the additional options that show up on the right, click on Paste Format only.

Hover the cursor over the ‘Paste Special’ option.

Right-click on any of the selected cells.

Select all the cells where you want the indentation to be applied.

Copy the cell where you already have indentation (just select and press Control + C).

Since this is just a copy paste, it’s faster than applying the formatting to new cells every time you have these.īelow are the steps to copy indentation from one cell and apply it to others in Google Sheets: You can copy the formatting from the cells that already have the indentation applied and then you can paste just the formatting to these new cells where you need to apply indentation. You can again do the same steps shown above and get the same formatting, but there is a quicker way also. When you apply this indentation to some cells, you get the desired output.īut what if you add more items to the list or more categories. For example, you can use the below custom number formats (use without the double quotes) to show a representation of a bulleted list. You can also get more creative and show some markers for the list. In case you want more indentation, you can use more space characters. The above steps would give you the final result as shown below.Īgain to reiterate, by adding the indentation using custom formatting, you have only changed the way text looks in the cell and not the actual text in the cell. In this step, I am manually specifying that I need an indent of 3 space characters (hence I have used three space characters followed by the sign. In the ‘Custom number formats’ dialog box, enter the following custom format (in the field at the top): ” (without the double quotes).Click on ‘Custom Number Formatting’. This will open the ‘Custom number formats’ dialog box.From the options on the right, hover the cursor over the ‘More Formats’ option.It will show additional options on the right. Hover the cursor over the Number option.You can hold the control key and then select these cells to make sure all cells are selected (even if these are non-contiguous) Select the cells for which you want to apply the indentation.Suppose you have a list as shown below and you want to show the category as normal text but the item in the category with a little indent to the right (as shown in the image below).īut when you enter these values in Google Sheets, you end up with a list with the same indentation.īelow are the steps to add indentation the items (while keeping the Category text as is): And in this method, that’s what we are going to do.

While mostly this is used for formatting numbers, we can also give it some custom format. All these are just different formats while the value in the cell remains the same. For example, you can have the value 44196 be displayed as 44196.00 or 44,196 or. Remember the number formatting only changes the format of the text/value in the cell, and not the value itself.

G docs lines auto indenting