Bullet points are a great way to make your document look a lot more interesting and lay out key information in an easily digestible way. But they’re not always easy to insert into your document, so in this article, I’m going to show you everything you need to know about using bullet points in Google Docs.
Prefer to watch a video about how to use bullet points in Google Docs? Click here.
How To Create Bullet Points In Google Docs
If you haven’t yet typed the text that you want to make into bullet points and you just have a blank space in your document where you want the bullet points to be added.
All you need to do is click to insert the cursor wherever you want to create the list, and then click the “Bulleted List” icon near the right hand side of the menu across the top of the screen.
Now, a single bullet point will appear in your document…
And you’ll be ready to type whatever you want the first bullet point to be.
Then, once you’ve finished typing the first bullet point, to move on to the second one, simply press the “enter” key on your keyboard, and a new bullet point will appear below the first one.
Now, you can just keep adding new bullet points like this until your list is complete.
Then, once you’ve finished typing all your bullet points and you want to go back to typing normal text, press the enter key one more time, and that will create an additional bullet point that you obviously don’t want…
But then if you press the enter key again without typing anything, the additional bullet point will disappear and you’ll be back to typing regular text.
And that’s all there is to it.
How To Add Bullet Points To Existing Text In Google Docs
If you’ve already typed out the text that you want to add bullet points to, and you now have a list typed out without the bullet points. Don’t worry, you don’t have to retype the list, you can actually add bullet points to that existing list in just a few clicks.
All you need to do is highlight the list of regular text, and then click the “Bulleted list” icon near the right hand side of the menu across the top of the screen.
Now, hopefully, your entire list will be turned into bullet points!
But, depending on how the text in your document was formatted, it’s possible that the entire clump of text could all become one big bullet point like this:
But don’t worry, if that happens you’ll just need to put your cursor at the start of the second point where the second bullet point should go…
And then press the backspace key on your keyboard twice to bring the second point up to the same line as the first point.
Now, press the enter key, and the second point will move back down to it’s own line, and it will now have a bullet point.
Now, you’ll just need to continue this until all your points have bullet points.
It’s also possible that you might end up with an unwanted bullet point between every actual bullet point like this:
If that happens, you’ll just need to place your cursor after the unwanted bullet point…
And then press the backspace key on your keyboard three times to delete the point and the space.
Then, you’ll just need to repeat that process until all the unwanted bullet points are gone.
How To Make Sub Bullet Points In Google Docs
Now that you’ve created a bulleted list in your Google Doc, you might also want to add some sub-bullet points under some of the main points.
To do that, place your cursor at the end of the bullet point you want the sub-bullet point to be under. So for example, if you want to add a sub-bullet point under the second main point, you would put your cursor at the end of the second point.
Now, press the enter key on your keyboard, and a new main bullet point will be added…
But then, if you press the tab key on your keyboard, the main bullet point will turn into a sub-bullet point.
Now, you can simply type whatever you want the sub-bullet point to say.
You can now repeat this process if you want to add sub-bullet points to other main points, or you can press the enter key at the end of the sub-bullet point to add multiple sub-bullet points to the one main bullet point.
How To Change The List Spacing
By now you’ve probably noticed that all the bullet points are pretty close together making the whole list look a little scrunched up. But don’t worry, there are actually two different ways that you can go about spacing the list out.
The easiest way is to change the line height for the list, to do that, just highlight the entire bulleted list and click “Format” in the menu across the top of the screen…
Then, in the menu that appears, hover your mouse over “Line & paragraph spacing”…
And in the smaller menu that appears next to that, you’ll see the line spacing is currently set to “Single”.
But if you change it to “1.15”, “1.5”, or even “Double”…
Each bullet point will now be spaced out a lot further.
So that way is really good, it’s very easy to do and makes your list look nice and easy to read. But the problem with this method is that it really only works if each bullet point in the list is quite short like the demonstration list I’ve been using.
If some of the bullet points in your list have a lot of text in the one point so that one bullet point needs to be split across two or more lines, and you try to space them out using this method, the two lines of the one bullet point will be spaced out just as much as the different bullet points which probably isn’t ideal.
So if you do have long bullet points like this, I would recommend you leave the line spacing set to “Single”, and space the bullet points out using the second method instead.
To do that, highlight the entire list just like before, and just like before, click “Format” in the menu across the top of the screen.
Now, in the menu that appears, hover over “Line & paragraph spacing”…
But this time, in the smaller menu that appears, click “Add space before list item”.
Now, each bullet point will be nicely spaced out, while multiple lines of the same bullet point are still close together.
This will make it much clearer for your readers because it will be easy to tell which bullet point is which.
How To Change The Bullet Icons
Now that you’ve created all your bullet points, added sub-bullet points if you wanted to, and spaced everything out nicely, you might be thinking there’s nothing much left to do.
And that’s mostly true, but your bullet points don’t actually have to be bullet points, if you’re not crazy about the little dot icons, there are quite a few other styles you can choose from.
To change your bullet points to something a little different looking, all you need to do is highlight your entire list, and click on the little drop-down arrow next to the bulleted list button.
Now, you’ll see a few different icon options like stars and arrows that you can use in place of the standard old circles. And all you need to do is click on the option that takes your fancy…
And the bullet point icons will be changed!
And that’s all there is to it! Now you know everything there is to know about using bullet points in Google Docs.
