Clever Clogs tip # 694
16 March 2022


Indent the second line of a bulleted or numbered list with pictures or text rather than a bullet or number (Word, Outlook and PowerPoint) *

Yep, I skipped a week... I was in London to see the magical story of the world's favourite nanny - and still find myself singing "Feed the birds" and humming supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Um-dittle-ittl-um-dittle-I.

But I digress.

Here is last week's tip, almost a week later than intended...

When you create a bulleted or numbered list it automatically continues the list every time you press ENTER. But there may be times you don't want that. So how do you get the second line of a bulleted or numbered list to line up with pictures or text? For example:

In short, I didn't want a bullet point for the image and also not for the text underneath the picture.

You can obviously click the Bullets or Numbering button on the Home or Message tab to switch it off and use the Increase Indent button, but there's a nifty keyboard shortcut for it.

Here's how:

  1. Start your bulleted or numbered list, as normal. (See tip 506 for some suggestions.)
  2. Press SHIFT + ENTER to move the cursor to the next line.
  3. Insert the picture or type the text you don't want bulleted or numbered, pressing SHIFT + ENTER as you go along.
  4. Press ENTER when you want to continue with your bulleted or numbered list. (In Word and Outlook you can press ENTER twice if you want to completely stop the bullets or numbers. This doesn't work in PowerPoint.)

SHIFT + ENTER can also be useful if you don't want to have the gap you normally get when you press ENTER. Oh, and if you press CTRL + ENTER you insert a page break.

Finally, see whether you might also find SHIFT + ENTER useful for something like this:

Related tips

  1. Fast way to start a bulleted or numbered list (Microsoft Word and Outlook) - tip_506.php
  2. How to add, find and remove line breaks (Microsoft Excel) - tip_458.php
  3. Convert bullet points into professionally designed layouts with icons (PowerPoint for Microsoft 365) - tip_646.php

This and last week's CleverClogsTipTime on LinkedIn, in case you missed it...

  1. Your Outlook setting recommendation for 4 March
  2. Useful monkey grips
  3. Give it a squeeze

Useful? "Pay me", in Likes and Comments and Shares on LinkedIn.


* Unless stated otherwise this tip is written for Microsoft 365 desktop apps and Windows 10 users, but might also be useful in Office 2010, 2013 and 2016.