Indenting bulleted lists

[Joshi Vallejo]

I feel silly asking this but is there any way to indent bulleted lists?

I just want to be able to move things to the right? I feel like this should be a basic feature or I maybe it's there and I am just missing something. 

• thing 1 
• thing 2 
• thing 3

[Deleted user]

Insert bullet list (Ctrl + Shilf + B)

Indented bullet list - put the cursor on the beginning and press tab.

[Edwin Uy]

Nope, indenting bullet indenting DOES NOT WORK :(

Once it is 'bulleted' can't even press TAB anymore

You set all these INDENT properly, hit the bullet and then it push them all back to the LEFT it is really frustrating --- same thing using the numbered list, was kinda hoping maybe it will work with numbered but NO :(

A lot of formatting frustrations especially when trying to indent text boxes, maybe can work around using text boxes + code snippets all over the place but it's a real pain

[Fiona Maher]

100%!

[Evgenii]

Hi, @Joshi Vallejo 

Welcome to Atlassian Community

Sure, Confluence has such functionality. To indent text, use the Indent button on the toolbar or press the Tab key. This works for both blocks of text and bulleted or numbered lists.

You can find more information about text formatting in Confluence Cloud here:
https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/format-text/

[Fiona Maher]

This doesn't work. Tabbing an existing numbered list doesn't do anything (and the indent right button is greyed out).

If I right indent multiple paragraphs so they all line up slightly indented under the heading, then apply numbered list to paragraphs within the content - the numbered lists move back to the left margin with no way to indent them right.

Heading

   Paragraph line starts here

1. Numbered list is pushed back to the left.

   Next paragraph starts here

I want content to look like this:

Heading

   Paragraph line starts here

   1. Numbered list is pushed back to the left.

   Next paragraph starts here

When there is a text heavy article with a lot of headings, it's much easier to read when the headings are slightly left compared to the content paragraphs underneath.

[pedro_peixoto]

@evgeni 

Nope, it doesn't work; You can't indent in the first element of a bulleted or ordered list.

[Joshua Brock _ Seibert Group_ GmbH]

Hi @Joshi Vallejo and welcome!

Your frustration is understandable, as what you're hitting is a real limitation in the Cloud editor, not something you're doing wrong.

The editor treats a list as a single block: any manual indents you set beforehand get stripped the moment you toggle bullets or numbering, and Tab only nests items from the second item onward. As pedro_peixoto noted above, you can't indent the first element of a bulleted or ordered list at all.

Within native Confluence, the practical workarounds are: create the list first and then use Tab / Shift+Tab (or the toolbar indent buttons) to nest items below the first one, or use page layouts/sections to push whole blocks to the right. Neither gives you free-form indentation of text boxes, though — that part is simply not supported today.

This should just be possibly natively, sadly it isn't so I will simply offer If you're open to a marketplace app, the structured-formatting side of this (the "text boxes + code snippets all over the place" pain) is what our app, Aura Content Formatting Macros ... among many other things ... was built to fix:

• 20+ professionally designed macros (tabs, cards, panels, expands, buttons, and more) that work right inside the Confluence editor, no code needed
• Panels and cards give you proper, movable containers for content, so you're not improvising structure out of text boxes and code snippets
• Numbered Headings are included for cleanly structured, hierarchical documents (no separate app needed)
• Admin-level Color Palettes and Custom Fonts keep the styling consistent across the whole instance
• Works on both Cloud and Data Center

Just to be blunt, it won't change how native bullet indentation behaves, as that's core editor behavior, but it removes most of the reasons you'd be fighting it in the first place.

If you're interested, give it a look... and, in full disclosure, I work at Seibert Group, the team behind the Aura Apps.


Hope this helps, best of luck, and again welcome to the Community!

Joshua
Content Writer & US Representative
Aura Apps and Agile Hive (products of Seibert Group GmbH)