From the course: InDesign Secrets
162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text
- I have a table here with a bunch of numbers, and these are dollar amounts, or maybe yen, or euros. I don't know. But I'd like to apply a currency symbol to the number automatically, you know, without having to type it. Why can't I make a paragraph style or a cell style apply the currency symbol? Well, it turns out I can, and the trick lies in an unlikely place, bullets. I have the cursor inside that table cell there, and I'm going to switch to the paragraph mode in my control panel and turn on the bullet feature. Now that bullet is a round dot, but who says a bullet has to be a round dot? I hate these round dot bullets. Makes me feel like I'm in Microsoft Word or something. Instead, I'm going to change this to a cooler bullet, a currency bullet. To do that I'm going to hold down the Option key on the Mac, or Alt key on Windows, and click that same button again, the Bullets button in the control panel. That brings up the Bullets and Numbering dialog box. Now there's several different options for bullets here, and I'm going to create my own, a new bullet here by clicking the Add button. When I click the Add button, I can choose any character from any font I have on my system. So, for example, I could choose the dollar sign. When you add a bullet, you have a choice, down here this check box, Remember Font With Bullet. In other words, when you apply this bullet, do you always want it to be this character in this font or not? And here where we're trying to apply a currency character we don't want it to remember that particular font. We just want the character, a dollar sign. I'll click OK, and I'll select that inside my Bullets and Numbering field, and you can see that there's a little U here underneath the dollar sign. That means it's going to apply any font not just the Minion font that we chose. So I select that, and now I need to do one more thing in here. I need to remove the tab, that caret T means tab. I'm simply going to select it and hit the delete key on my keyboard to delete it. Now there won't be any text after the dollar sign at all. Click OK, and there we go. It replaced that boring round dot with a dollar sign. Now, of course, once you've done one of these, you could turn it into a paragraph style easily enough. I'll open my Paragraph Styles panel, and I'm going to say this is a New Paragraph style called Prices, and I'll apply it to the selection. Click OK. In fact, I'll apply it to all of these simply by dragging over all these cells, and clicking on this Paragraph style. With one click, I have a dollar sign in front of all of those numbers. This total down here is in the wrong font so I'm going to click down here and create a new paragraph style, This one's going to be the total price, and this one's going to be in a different font. So I'll click on the Basic Character Formats pane, and I'm going to change this to the font I want which is Myriad Pro. I'll just type M-Y to jump to Myriad Pro, and then let's make it bold. Click OK, and you can see that not only did it change the font of the price, it also changed the font of the dollar sign, that bullet. Again, that's because that bullet character was not connected to the original font, not connected to a Minion. It'll have changed it to any font we're using. Now later on if we decide that we need to change the currency symbol, it's really easy. All we need to do is right-click on Prices, the paragraph style, click edit Prices, and then change the Bullets and Numbering. Remember this one used the dollar sign. Let's add a different one. I'll click Add, and instead of clicking on the dollar sign up here, I'll change it to something different like maybe yen down here. Or, scroll down a little bit and I'll find my euro symbol, turn off the Remember Font with Bullet check box, click OK, select it in here, and then click OK. In an instant, all of those have changed from dollar signs to euro signs. Remember, sometimes you need to think outside the box, and Automatic Bullets and Numbering are a great way to apply all kinds of extra characters before text in your document.
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Contents
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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