How to Indent a Row in Smartsheet (Tab)

Pressing Tab while a row (rather than an individual cell) is selected indents that row, making it a child/subtask of the row directly above it — establishing a genuine hierarchical parent-child relationship in the sheet's underlying data structure, not just a visual nesting effect. **Getting the row selected, not just a cell**: this shortcut specifically requires row-level selection rather than being inside cell-edit mode — clicking a row's number/handle on the left edge of the grid, or using Shift+Space (covered on the grid-navigation category page) to select the entire current row, puts you in the right state for Tab to indent rather than simply moving to the next cell. **What indenting actually changes structurally**: beyond the visual indentation itself, several other Smartsheet features depend directly on this parent-child relationship. The Gantt view can automatically roll up a parent row's displayed date range to reflect the combined span of its children's own dates. Hierarchical reports and summaries group and total data according to this same structure. A flat list of same-level rows and a properly indented hierarchy containing identical individual tasks are genuinely different underlying data structures, not just two different visual presentations of the same information. **Multiple indent levels**: pressing Tab repeatedly on the same row (or on successive newly created rows) can nest several levels deep — a project phase, containing tasks, potentially containing their own sub-tasks — and Smartsheet supports this multi-level nesting without a hard-coded depth limit, though very deep nesting (five or six levels) tends to become visually hard to track and is worth avoiding purely for readability's sake even where it's technically supported. **Indenting relative to context**: a row can only indent to become a child of whatever row is directly above it — attempting to indent when there's no eligible parent row above (for instance, trying to indent the very first row in a sheet) simply does nothing, since there's nothing for it to become a child of. **Reversing an indent**: Shift+Tab, covered in more depth on the row-management category page, promotes a row back up one level, the exact reverse of this shortcut — useful when project structure changes and a row needs to move up in the hierarchy, either because it was nested too deep originally or because its actual relationship to surrounding tasks has genuinely changed. **Indenting and the Gantt view together**: switching to Gantt view (covered on the grid-navigation category page) after building out an indented hierarchy shows parent rows visually containing their children's timeline bars, with the parent's own bar often spanning the full combined range of its children automatically — this automatic roll-up behavior is one of the more genuinely useful payoffs of having taken the time to build a proper indented hierarchy rather than leaving every row at the same flat level. **Mistake to avoid**: indenting a row while accidentally still in cell-edit mode (rather than row-selected mode) does nothing, since Tab's meaning depends entirely on which of those two states you're currently in — if Tab seems to just move to the next cell instead of indenting, double-check that you've genuinely selected the whole row (Shift+Space, or clicking its row handle) rather than just having a single cell active within it. **Related shortcuts**: Insert Row and Delete Row, both covered on the row-management category page, are commonly used alongside indenting when actively building out a project's task breakdown structure — insert a new row, indent it into place beneath the appropriate parent, and repeat for each subtask as the overall hierarchy takes shape.