Google Slides – Line spacing & Text indenting

Here we’ll look at a couple of simple little tools which can help make your text in your Slides that much better. They are line spacing and indent.

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Changing the line spacing

In this example, I’ve got a slide with some point on it, which as there are only 4 points, I want to spread it out a little to make it more readable and so it fits on the slide more equally.

Click on the text box you want to change.

Go to the toolbar and click on the “Line spacing” icon.

Usually by default it’s set at 1.15, let’s change it to Double.

As you can see there is much more spacing in between the lines.

From the same menu, you can also add space before the item or afterwards, which can be useful for titles and headings. Plus, you can customise the amount of spacing yourself by clicking on “Custom spacing”.

Here you can enter the amount of spacing for all the lines (on the left) or before and after the item selected (on the right). Just click the Apply button once you’ve changed the settings.

Here I’ve changed it to a line spacing of “3”, so basically there are 2 lines of space in between each line of text (2+1=3).

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Changing the indent

We can also change the position horizontally of the text by controlling the indent.

Click on the text box, then click on the “Increase indent” icon on the toolbar.

This moves the text to the right.

Normally I would just move the text box but if for example, the text box is coloured, I may want the colour to cover all the text box area, whereas the text may be further from the edge.

Here I’ve indented the text, but as you can see the coloured box remains the same.

We can also indent individual sentences not just the whole text in the text box. Here I’ve added extra lines and I want to indent the “Easy to use” line as it’s a sub-point of the line above.

Click on the line just before the first letter, in this case the “E”.

You can either click on the Increase indent icon on the toolbar, or simply press the Tab key to indent the line. Here I’ve done the same for every other line to create sub-points.

If you want to decrease an indent, either click on the “Decrease indent” icon or press Shift + Tab key.

The above also applies to paragraphs too not just bullet points. Here is a piece of text.

Here’s the same text with double spacing.

Here’s the text which has been indented a few times. Note, I’ve gone back to the default line spacing.

Then I add an image to the left of the text.