Why Would You Use Tabs?

At first glance, tabs look the same as indentation, so how are they different? Why would you even use a tab if an indent would get the same result?

When you are working in a paragraph, you use tabs to align the words within it. For example, in a resume, I may want to create the following line. Using tabs, I can space out each set of words and my resume looks more professional.


When you are working with longer paragraphs and sentences, you want to use indents. There are two kinds of indent – the edge of the page indent and the first line indent. The first line indent only indents the first line. The edge of the page indent will indent the rest of the lines in the paragraph either from the left and/or the right hand side of the margins.

Before you start working with tabs, you should be able to recognize different kinds of tabs and what they mean. The tabs I find are used the most often are the left and right tabs.

1) Left



2) Right

3) Centre



4) Decimal



5) Bar

There are two different ways of accessing tabs. You can set them through the ruler, or you can work more precisely through the Format Tabs dialog box.

• The Ruler

If you use the ruler, choose the tab you want to work with, then click where on the ruler that you want it to go. To delete a tab from the ruler, drag it off the ruler.

• The Tabs Dialog Box

In Word XP and 2003, go to Format/Tabs. In Word 2007, double click on a tab in the ruler, or click on the Tabs button at the bottom of the Paragraph dialog box.

To insert or modify a tab in the Tabs dialog box, just start at the top of the box and work your way down. I will demonstrate this below, using the Word image showing the Student, and their Class, Instructor and Grade.

1. Start by typing in the Tab stop Position. This basically means, where on the ruler do you want the tab to go. In our example above, the first tab is at the 1" mark.
2. Next, choose your alignment. Out first tab is a left tab.
3. Then, if a leader is necessary, choose which kind you want. Here we don't choose a leader at all.
4. Finally we click the Set button.

At the end, click Set and not OK, to leave the dialog box open and continue working with tabs. If you click OK, the dialog box closes, and you have to re-open it again to apply your second tab. For practice, try typing the text indicated in the picture above into your own version of Word. Once you've set your tabs in the dialog box or ruler, don't forget to APPLY your tab i.e. press the Tab key on the keyboard! This is the most common thing to forget about tabs!

The Default Tab Stops indicate how much your tab will indent your text if you just press the Tab key, without setting a tab in the ruler. For example, the default tab stop is usually set to a 0.5". This means that every time you press the tab key, it will move your text over by half an inch.

The Leader is a type of underline which links one piece of text to another. You see this most often in tables of contents, where a dotted leader is used to link chapter titles to page numbers.