My Favorite "Little" Features in InDesign CS3

InDesign is one of those programs that I depend on every day and although they added a lot of great new WOW! features into InDesign CS3, some of my favorites are the little things that they added that just make life a lot easier and take miles off of my mouse each day. Here are my favorite "little" features that have been added:

• InDesign CS2 allowed you to double-click on a text frame using the Selection Tool and it would automatically switch to the Type tool. InDesign CS3 now allows you to go back to the Selection Tool once your in the Type Tool by simply hitting the esc key on your keyboard. As a mac user, I now have a reason to use the esc key! It was getting lonely!

• Editing pictures works much the same way. If I double click on a graphic frame with my Selection Tool, InDesign CS3 automatically switches to my Direct Selection Tool. In the same respect, after I'm finished scaling an image with my Direct Selection tool, I can double-click and InDesign CS3 will switch back to my Selection Tool.

• This one has to do with Styles. It would always annoy me in prior versions of InDesign that when I would style some text and then create a new Character or Paragraph Style out of it, I would still have to manually apply that Style to the selected text. No longer! Now when you create a Style, there is a checkbox within the New Paragraph or Character Style dialog box called "Apply Style to Selection." This automatically applies your newly created style to the text that you have selected or are clicked inside of.

• Finally, it has become very apparent in InDesign CS3 that Adobe rewards your for having a big monitor! If you go to the Panel (flyout) menu in the Control Panel at the top of your screen there is a new feature called Customize. This dialog box allows you to control exactly what is displayed in your Control Panel. For those of us who don't have a huge screen, you can turn off some of the features that you don't regularly use so that the ones that you do use will appear up there. One of my often used buttons up there is the Fit content to frame button when you click on a text frame with the Selection Tool. If you don't have a large monitor it appears at first glance that it's gone! In reality, there just might not be enough room for it. Customizing your Control Panel will fix this problem. It works in reverse as well, you'll notice that if you do have a big monitor or at least have your screen resolution set fairly high, that paragraph formatting starts to show up in your Control Panel when you are viewing your Character Formatting options and vice verse!

Well those are just a few of my favorites. Enjoy!

Welcome

Greetings All! Welcome to the Chad and Rob Show. This blog was created to share ideas, tips, tricks, workflow ideas, opinions and a whole lot more about design applications and related information. Rob and I have been working together for several years now and always thought that this would be a good way to share information that we know and have learned over the years. There is a good likelihood that there will not be a post every single day but we do hope to post one or two times a week. We encourage feedback and suggestions to content that you would like to hear about on this blog. We hope you all enjoy and we look forward to the upcoming posts!