Create a text Macro - InCopy Tutorial

- [Instructor] Text macros are similar to auto-correct in that they can automatically type text based on a keystroke combination. The difference is that a macro can contain several lines of text and can actually also retain the text formatting and be invoked using a keyboard shortcut. Let's take a closer look. I'm beginning this video with the text macros.indd file open inside of InCopy, I'm going to go to the window menu and choose text macros to open up that panel. Now I'm just going to pull this out and close everything else here just to keep things clean. And at the bottom here, I can click on the new macro button to create a new text macro. Now, you have to go through your projects and determine is there text that you're constantly typing and could you make it easier by using a text macro? So in my case, we always put some text at the bottom of the letter to the editor section, and it'd be nice if I could just quickly put it in there whenever I needed it. So what we could do is we could enter a macro code, and like I said, this is very similar to auto-correct in that we just kind of type a keystroke combination, and that'll invoke the macro. So for this macro, I'm going to call this leted for letter to the editor. And for the macro text, I can type whatever I want to put in here. So I'm going to type here please send letters to colon, hit return, and then I'll call this leters@lmmag.com, hit return or return again, and then I'll put the address. So I'm going to type in here P.O. Box. And then we'll put a city here. I'm going to use a city. There we go, and you can put anything else in here that you wish. Now, down here, you'll see a checkbox that says remember text attributes. Now, this would only apply if you had already typed this in InCopy, and you copied that text and pasted it in here. In that case, you could have it remember whatever text attributes are applied to that text. So I'm going to leave that unchecked for now, and then if you wanted to assign a keyboard shortcut to this you could do so here, so for example for the macro shortcut, I could type whatever I wanted to, maybe Option + 3, and you can see it here it tells me that that shortcut is unassigned so it's no problem to use that. And I'll then go ahead and click okay, and now we have right here the text macro that I've created. Now I want to show you a few things before I use this macro. You'll notice in the panel menu here, we have this option that says automatically swap macro text, and with that enabled, that's what allows you to type that keystroke combination, and it'll automatically populate with that information. If you didn't want that to happen, you could certainly uncheck that, and then you would have to select the macro, and then you could insert the macro wherever you were clicked. And you could ever swap the macro text, and that basically is the same command as this. It just doesn't happen automatically. And you'll notice we can delete the macro, duplicate a macro if you wanted to just create a modification of one. And then down here at the bottom, you can edit the macro if you realize you need to add something or make a change, you can do so that way. And create a new macro or trash the macro. So let's see how this works. I'm going to click inside of this text frame here, go to my assignments panel, and I'm going to check out that story. So now I can actually edit the text in this frame. I'm going to zoom in down here at the bottom, and again I'm just going to click where I want to insert the text and if I type leted and hit the space bar, you'll notice that right now, nothing is happening, and that's because the panel menu here, I turned off automatically swap macro text. Now again, if you choose to do that, what you can do with the cursor immediately after the key combination, we can come up here to the panel menu and choose swap macro text, and then, it's going to automatically populate with the information inside of my macro. Now if you want to see how this would work using the key combination, I'll just delete this. Go to the panel menu, turn on automatically swap macro text, and now if I type that keystroke combination, leted, and hit the space bar, it'll automatically populate it the minute I hit that space, and it'll enter all of the lines of copy. I do want to point out that these text macros are not specific to a document, but will reside on your computer so you can use them in any document that you wish. These can be a huge time-saver, and for text that you must type repeatedly in your projects, take advantage of text macros inside of InCopy.