Tabs and following line indentions ?

Question

So if I tab the first line of a paragraph, in order to have the following lines of text align directly with the first line, I must select each paragraph, remove the tab and create an indent? Is there not a global setting I can select that says, "if the first line is tabbed then the following text will align with the first line text after tab?"
Example:
[TAB] 001. My first line is here and this
second line represents the continuance
of a paragraph as does this third line just
to give an example of what I do not want.
There is no left alignement of the following
text lines to the tabbed first line.
What I really want is:
[-TAB-] 001. This is how I would like for the following
[space] text to appear after a tab is inserted. The word
[space] tab and space in brackets are acting as a
[space] visual to indicate the alignment I want. Is there
[space] not a global setting that does this?
If you have followed me to this point, thanks for sticking with me. I know I can set a style and create the indent, but this means I will have to manually set over one hundered paragraphs to that style. It's not hard just time consuming.
Thanks in advance!!

Answer 1

Computers are not typewriters (which have no way to specify an indent other than hitting the tab key) and professional type is set without leading tabs, except for special cases using tabular type data where a particular row might be missing the first entry or the tab is required for special alignment (center aligned or decimal aligned, for example).
This is not as big a deal as you make it out to be. Define the paragraph style you need with the correct indents and do a GREP search for ^\t(.) and change to $1 and set the change formatting to your new paragraph style. This expression looks for a tab character at the start of a paragraph and any character that follows it, then replaces the tab and following character with just the following character (essentially deleting the tab), and assigns the style of your choice inthe format options.