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Problem with bullet point indents in Word

Anonymous
2022-01-15T18:19:42+00:00

HIi,

I'm having a lot of frustration with bullet points. I am finding that they will automatically indent way too far whenever I enter text below it.

I'm using this word doc to type out notes, so I think it's a problem with the paragraphs that's causing this.

The tab indent is much more here than the normal 1.27 cm that I would prefer.

Is there a solution so that the bullet point indents don't change with every paragraph?

Thanks!

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. John Korchok 231.6K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2022-01-15T18:53:05+00:00

    Are you using the bulleting button on the ribbon? Don't.

    Instead create a custom typestyle that has exactly the formatting you prefer:

    1. Format a paragraph with your indentation and leave the insertion mark blinking inside the paragraph.
    2. Open the Styles pane (Alt + Ctrl + Shift + S)
    3. Click on the Manage Styles button at the bottom of the dialog.
    4. On the Edit tab, click on New Style.
    5. Give your style a name.
    6. Check the Add to the Style Gallery option.
    7. To make the style available to all future documents, check the New documents based on this template option.
    8. OK out.

    Now when you want to apply bulleting, select the text, then click on your style in the Style gallery.

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  1. John Korchok 231.6K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2022-01-16T10:56:58+00:00

    When you re-open the dialog, the default display has the option set to Only in this document. Perhaps that's what you're seeing?

    But I'm adding one more step to the routine, since the New documents based on this template appears in both dialogs. Please give this a try:

    1. Format a paragraph with your indentation and leave the insertion mark blinking inside the paragraph.
    2. Open the Styles pane (Alt + Ctrl + Shift + S)
    3. Click on the Manage Styles button at the bottom of the dialog.
    4. To make the style available to all future documents, check the New documents based on this template option.
    5. On the Edit tab, click on New Style.
    6. Give your style a name.
    7. Check the Add to the Style Gallery option.
    8. There's another pair of options here, check the New documents based on this template option again.
    9. OK out.

    For most people, the template being referred to is the Normal.dotm template. If the above steps don't work for you, I'll go through how to open your Normal.dotm template so we can create the style directly in there.

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-01-16T01:28:54+00:00

    One problem I am running into now is my styles don't show up in new documents. Whenever the document saves it changes the setting from "New documents based on this template" back to "only in this document". I turned off Autosave, but that didn't fix the problem.

    Could this be because I'm uploading docs to OneDrive?

    Thanks for your help

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  3. John Korchok 231.6K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2022-01-15T20:42:12+00:00

    Hey, thanks! Glad to help.

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-01-15T20:01:01+00:00

    Thank you! You are a hero.

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