203 Sharing custom workspaces

- Custom Workspaces are one of the best features in InDesign. It's a way for you to gather together all of your favorite panels that you use most often for a particular task without having to hunt for them in the Window menu the whole time. Now I'm going to review custom Workspaces quickly in this video, but the main point is that I want to show you how to share custom Workspaces. That's a question that I hear a lot. I've created this fantastic Workspace for working on our interactive PDFs, for example, and I want everybody in the office to use that same Workspace.

Do I have to tell them exactly which panels to add to create their own version of the Workspace? No, unfortunately though it's not quite as easy as choosing load and save, like InDesign has for swatches or styles. But it's actually not too difficult to do. I'm going to show you where the secret files are and how to share them. First let's review how custom Workspaces work. When you get InDesign you have a bunch of default Workspaces like Essentials, for example. And I often will switch to one of these other ones like Advanced.

These are simply a collection of the panels that you use most often and their settings. You can also see Workspaces from the Window menu in the Workspace flyout. The ones with the brackets are the default Workspaces. If I switch to one of my custom Workspaces, like Presentations, you'll see that I've collected some specific kinds of panels that I use when I'm using InDesign for presentations, like the SWF Preview panel. And now the Swatches panel is hanging out here, because the last time that I used my Presentations Workspace I removed the Swatches panel from the dock.

To put it back to how it was originally when I created the Workspace I just choose Reset Presentations. Now let's say that I wanted to share my Presentations Workspace with somebody. First I have to locate where this file is on my hard drive. It's inside my user preferences folder, but instead of having to dig down through various folders and subfolders in my operating system I can use this cool little trick. If you go to the Window menu and open up the Scripts panel you'll see that there's a folder here called User.

Right-click on it and you'll see a menu that lets you Reveal this folder's location in the Finder, or in Windows Explorer if you're on Windows. Choose that and it selects the Scripts panel for you in the Finder and one level about the Scripts panel is the folder full of your Workspaces. Tada! It's these XML files that you want to copy and paste outside of this folder, and then zip them up and attach them to an email or put them on your work place server and tell people how to download them.

So I wanted to share the Presentations Workspace, I'm going to select that, and copy it, and then I'll put it on my Desktop or elsewhere, and then send it. By the way you may be wondering why some of these have two versions, like EPUB.xml and EPUB_CurrentWorkspace.xml. InDesign is keeping track of not just the original EPUB, but also the current state of it. So when you choose Reset it brings you back to this version. I thought that was kind of interesting. Now let's say that you're the recipient of a Workspace and I happen to have a Workspace right here, one that somebody else created called Text Editing.

How do I add that to InDesign? Basically the same way that I located them. In InDesign go to the Scripts panel, right-click, choose Reveal in Finder on that User folder. Here is the Workspaces folder and you want to copy and paste, or drag and drop the Workspace that somebody sent you right into that folder. You don't need to restart InDesign. If I jump back, where is that Workspace folder? If you go to the Window menu, go down to Workspaces, and there it is, Text Editing.

So I choose Text Editing. Conditional Text, Cross-References, Hyperlinks, that makes sense. It's a little strange that it doesn't automatically appear here in the application bar, you'll need to restart InDesign for it to populate here, but the Workspace will always automatically appear here as soon as you pop it right into that folder on your hard drive. So until Adobe decides to add a save and load Workspace command all you need to know is how to quickly get to the secret lair of the Workspaces by right-clicking on the User folder in the Scripts panel.

That's how you share them.