So I'm writing a lot of short stories in Word, and I have made a lot of quick styles so that I can easily apply the heading, body text and special formatting for stuff like newspaper articles, letters, and even one for my section divider graphic.



This makes it really easy to format the text, and the only hard formatting I really have to do is applying bold, italics and in rare cases, underlines.

As I want to keep it this way, it is really frustrating that I have to press backspace to remove the first line indent in the beginning of every section, after an article, letter or any other moment where there has been a break from the normal body text style

So the question is, is there a way to have Windows not indent the first paragraph of a new style, but make the indent on every paragraph that follows. That would put my perfectionist mind to rest and spare me looking through the document multiple times just to double check if there is any I have missed.

You can make use the "Style for following paragraph" setting (in the Modify Style dialog box) to control which style is applied after you press Enter.

In this case I believe you need a style without an indent to be applied as you press Enter in your heading. The "un-indented" style, in turn, should have your ordinary body text style as its "Style for following paragraph."

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Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional