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Blindy8's avatar
Blindy8
Copper Contributor
Oct 18, 2023

When indenting in Word, the margins move

I am writing a book in Word and when I highlight block text for long quotes and try to indent them .5", the margins for surrounding text move too. I want the margins to remain in place at 1". It appears that Word interprets the surrounding text as part of the highlighted block of text and moves everything so my margins become 1.5".  If I add a line before and after the highlighted block text, the margins remain in place and the highlighted text does indent .5" but then I'm stuck with blank lines before and after the highlighted quote text, which shouldn't be there and can't be submitted to a publisher without looking amateurish. If I delete the blank lines, the block of indented, highlighted text goes back to the margin.  At this point, I have no idea what to do.

  • Blindy8 Is the block of text a separate paragraph?  It will need to be for you to be able to change the indents, unless you resort to inserting a tab space before the start of the text on each of the lines of the block.

  • Charles_Kenyon's avatar
    Charles_Kenyon
    Bronze Contributor

    Blindy8 

    Doug is right.

    See Margins and Indents in Word.

    Indents are paragraph formatting and is what you want to be adjusting, not margins.

     

    If you want, save a sample document with the problem on OneDrive or DropBox and post a share or view link to it here.

    • Blindy8's avatar
      Blindy8
      Copper Contributor

      Charles_Kenyon 

      Hi, Thanks for your imput. The problem was that Word was corrupted. Once it was reinstalled, it worked perfectly

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