176 Quickly empty out an InDesign document of text and images

- I often use one document that I've already finished as a starting point for a new document, but I usually need to get rid of all the text and graphics first. I want to keep the frames, though, that way I have something to put my new text and images into. So, I'm going to point out a few tips for getting rid of a bunch of stuff in your documents quickly. First, let's tackle the pictures. If you were good and put all your pictures on one layer, then you can select them all super quickly by opening the Layers panel and then holding down the option, or alt key, and clicking on that layer.

That selects all the objects on that layer. If you didn't have all your images on one layer, then you'd have to click on one and then shift-click on each of the other ones. Once you have all these graphic frames selected, you want to select the images inside those frames. And you can do that really quickly by clicking on this little weird-looking button up here in the control panel. It looks kind of like an alien or an octopus with a down arrow. That's the Select Content button and it selects inside frames to select the image inside of them. There's another way you can do it with a keyboard shortcut, too.

I'll use that; just press shift+esc. Again, that goes inside the frame and selects the image. Now to get rid of those, you simply have to click the delete key on your keyboard. Now of course, this only works one spread at a time. If you have a lot of pages of images and it's too annoying to do it one spread at a time, then head over to indesignsecrets.com/free and search for delete images. There it is down there: delete all images. If you click on that, you'll find a blog post from which you can download a script.

It's a free script and it works really well. If you don't know how to install a script, then you can read this blog post up here. Or you can watch the movie on that topic here in the online training library. I've already downloaded and installed that script, so I'll switch back to InDesign, and let's go run it. I'll go to the Window menu, choose Utilities, and then Scripts. Inside my user folder, I find that script so all I have to do is double-click on it. It warns me, "Are you sure you want "to delete all the graphics?" Yes I am. Now all the graphics throughout my document are gone.

I can see that by opening the Pages panel and just going to one of these other spreads. Graphics gone, but frames remain. Okay, now what about all this text? You can delete all the text in your document, from every text frame, really quickly. All you have to do is open your Find/Change dialogue box. I'll do that by pressing command+F, or control+F on Windows, then switch to the GREP tab. And in the Find what: field, I want you to type .+ then click Change all.

It goes through the whole document and deletes every text from every paragraph. It goes through your whole document and deletes all the text, but it does leave a bunch of empty paragraphs. So we can take care of those by changing this to \r not /, but \r+ and then Change all again. There's probably a faster way you can do this with just one GREP expression, but this is so easy and fast I don't even worry about it. Let's go ahead and close this dialogue box and close these panels, and we can see that this is now an empty document.

However, the last thing I often want to clean up is guides. I'll often have a bunch of page guides sitting around that I want to get rid of. And you can do that really quickly by pressing command+option+G on the Mac, or control+alt+G on Windows, and that selects all the guides on a spread. Then, again, you just press the delete key on your keyboard. So, like we saw before, it's just one spread at a time, but it goes pretty quickly. In no time at all, we've gone from a filled document to a nearly empty one, ready to repurpose as a template for our next project.