Unable to auto indent first line of paragraph in Word using Mac Dictation

Apple products work best for Macs. To indent the first line of a paragraph in a TextEdit document, drag the Indent slider right of the left end of Ruler. To save this indent, open menu ‘Format › Font › Styles… › Add to favorites’ and name your indent style ‘My Indent’. Siri can then be given two commands: ‘Choose a paragraph style’ and ‘My Indent’. TextEdit will continue to apply the indent to subsequent paragraphs.

Hello there, Nikkielynn.

It sounds like you're not seeing desired behavior from your Mac when using Dictation with Microsoft's Word application. The following Knowledge Base article offers up some great guidance on creating/customizing commands in dictation that may help in creating the desired behavior in Dication:

Use your voice to tell your Mac what to do

Create your own commands

After you select “Enable advanced commands,” an Add button appears beneath the list of commands.

1. Click the Add button to add “undefined command” to the list of commands.
2. Click the undefined command to select it, then configure these options:
   • When I say: Enter the word or phrase that you want to speak to perform the action.
   • While using: Choose whether your Mac performs the action only when you're using a particular app.
   • Perform: Choose the action to perform. You can open a Finder item, open a URL, paste text, paste data from the clipboard, press a keyboard shortcut, select a menu item, or run an Automator workflow.

To learn more about dictation, choose Help from the Finder menu bar, then search for “dictation.”

One thing you can also try, to further isolate the behavior, is to test in another application such as TextEdit or Pages. This article provides some explanation on how to accomplish that:

Mac OS X: How to troubleshoot a software issue

Thanks for participating in Apple Support Communities.

Kind Regards.

Hello again, Nikkielynn.

Thanks for the follow up on what you're trying to accomplish in dictation. Due to the nature of your question, it may be best if we get you in contact with someone who can look into this further. You may find more information by using another one of Apple's support resources - https://getsupport.apple.com

Cheers.

I think that this is a 'bug' in Word. MS has a reputation for using their own code instead of calling the Apple APIs, which mean MS apps don't integrate well with things like dictation. In this case, the code that actually renders the style doesn't seem to execute when the 'new line' instruction is dictated.

As a workaround, I would suggest you stick with dictating your text into another application, such as Text Edit. Then, when you're done copy and paste the lines into Word and apply your desired paragraph style to the whole lot in one go.

Another workaround is to save the document in another format, such as RTF, and then reopen it again. This seems to reapply the paragraph style(s) correctly.

C.