Forum Discussion
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.
Tab settings are paragraph formatting, not document formatting.
If you change them in one paragraph, they do NOT change elsewhere in the document. If you are inside a paragraph or at the end of a paragraph you've modified and press Enter, the change applies in the new paragraph.
Consider modifying the style applied to the paragraph instead of the paragraph.
References:
- The Importance of Styles in Microsoft Word
- 3. Using Styles to Format Text
- Managing Word Styles by Suzanne Barnhill, MVP
- 2.2 Why you should press Enter only once to end a paragraph
When you modify a style, you can check the option to also have the change apply in NEW documents based on the template.
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_KenyonBronze Contributor
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.
- Blindy8Copper Contributor
Hi, Thanks for your imput. The problem was that Word was corrupted. Once it was reinstalled, it worked perfectly
- Charles_KenyonBronze ContributorI'm glad you got it sorted out.