How to Indent Cells in Google Sheets and Excel

Indenting cells in Excel and Google Sheets is usually the best practice when formatting your model — I’ve seen folks use a tab space within cells (or manually add spaces) or even use different columns to mimic tab spacing. These are all janky workarounds that mess with formulas and spreadsheet organization.

While indenting should be a simple shortcut, it’s way more clicks than it should be. Especially in Google Sheets, where there’s no obvious indent button staring at you in the toolbar. So I made this quick guide to show you how.

Tip #1: The Built-In Way (Excel and Google Sheets)

Both Excel and Google Sheets have native indentation, but neither makes it particularly fast.

In Excel

Select your cells, then go to Home → Alignment group → click the “Increase Indent” button. Each click adds one level. There’s a keyboard shortcut too if you’re on Windows (doesn’t work on Mac): Alt+H,6 increases indent and Alt+H,5 decreases it.

In Google Sheets

In Google Sheets, you can either go to Format → Number → Custom number format, then manually add spaces to the front of your format string, or there’s also the “increase indent” option buried in Format → Align → Increase indent — but that’s three menu clicks deep every single time, and if you need to indent 20 line items in a model, you’re going to feel it.

Tip #2: The Fast Way with XLKeys (Google Sheets)

This is the fast method I actually built to solve this. XLKeys is a Chrome extension I built that brings Excel-style keyboard shortcuts to Google Sheets. One of those shortcuts is indent cycle: Alt+H,6 on Windows, Option+H,6 on Mac.

Hit it once to indent level one. Hit it again to indent level two, then level three, then it resets back to normal. No menus, no format strings, no mouse. Just select your cells and tap the shortcut.

I can indent an entire model in about ten seconds this way. It’s been quite handy and saved me tons of time. Give it a try and let me know what you think — also if you’re on Mac and trying to use Excel, I recommend just switching to Google Sheets and installing XLKeys now. It’ll save you tons of time.