214 Formatting text quickly with Apply Next

- I've said it before, and I'll say it again, take a little time now to setup your documents and that way you can save a lot of time later, when you have to knock out your pages quickly. And here's a tip that really reflects that philosophy. You can see that I have a basic recipe here, and I'm laying out a cookbook, and I need to lay out the pages quickly. Up at the top I have a title, I've got a description, then some ingredients, and then directions down here. It's all very standard. But I need to make it look like this one over on the left.

Here, let me zoom back to fit the whole spread on the window, Cmd Option 0 or Ctrl Alt 0. There we go, I need it to look like this. So what if I told you that I could format this whole page in just three steps? Three steps to replicate that layout. Okay, ready? First, I'm going to select this text frame, it's a single text frame, and I'm going to make it a five column frame instead of just one. To do that, I'm gonna press Cmd or Ctrl B, that opens up the Text Frame Options dialog box, and I'm going to change this to a five column frame.

Click OK, and now we have five different columns. Second step, I need to apply some paragraph styles. So I'm going to double-click inside this frame to switch to the Type tool, and select a bunch of that text. Right now, I'm just selecting from the title down through the ingredients. Then I'll open my Paragraph Styles panel, and I'm going to right-click on title, and choose Apply "title" then Next Style. Finally, for step three, I'm gonna select the rest of my text, from directions down to the end of the story, and I'm going to right-click on heading - Directions, and choose Apply "heading - Directions" then Next Style.

And, boom, I'm done. Three steps, very fast. Now, changing the number of columns is easy, we all know how to do that. But what was that other feature? The one in the Paragraph Styles context menu? Well, that's what took a little time to setup in advance, that's what I wanna show you. It's called Apply Next, and the Apply Next feature is a hidden feature that you can only use when you have two or more paragraphs selected, or a whole text frame, and when you've setup your paragraph styles with a feature called Next Style.

Let me show you that. Let's look at the definition of the title paragraph style. In order to edit this style without applying it to the currently selected text, I'm going to right-click on it, or Ctrl-click with a one-button mouse, and then choose Edit. Up here, at the top of the dialog box, you'll see a pop-up menu called Next Style. Right now it's set to deck, but you can set this to any paragraph style that you've already created. This pop-up menu is the key to the whole trick. Let's click Cancel.

You can see that the first paragraph is set to title, the second paragraph is set to deck, the third paragraph is set to description, and so on. By identifying the pattern of what style follows what, I can setup those Next Style pop-up menus, and then use that Apply Next Style feature. Description is going to be followed by heading - Ingredients, heading - Ingredients is followed by ingredients, and so on. Now, in this case, I don't know how many ingredients there are going to be. Now let's look at the definition of the ingredients style.

I'll double-click on that, because my cursor was already in that paragraph style, and I can see that the Next Style is set to Same style. That means it's going to keep repeating the ingredients style all the way to the end of the selection. I'll click Cancel here, because I don't wanna change anything. And now, obviously, the directions heading is followed by the directions first para, which is followed by directions, and so on. So you see the pattern, right? And you can see how I could setup that next style pop-up menu for each of those paragraph styles.

So, okay, let's undo the work we did, and see it in action one more time. I'm gonna press Cmd Z, or Ctrl Z, twice, just to go back to where we had the unformatted text inside the five columns. You can see that I have that first chunk of text selected, from the title all the way through all of the ingredients. I'll right-click on the title paragraph style, or again, Ctrl-click with a one-button mouse, and there's my new feature. Now, I should point out that this feature, Apply then Next Style, only appears inside this context menu.

And, like I said, only when you have more than one paragraph selected. Technically, it does appear in one other place in InDesign, you can choose it when setting up an Object Style, but that's a story for another day. So anyway, I'm going to go ahead and click that, and all that formatting is selected. And once again, I'll select that other part of the text, from the directions heading to the end, and now I'm going to right-click on heading - Directions, and choose Apply "heading - Directions" then Next Style, and that whole pattern is being applied, one paragraph after the next.

Now, you might also be wondering how this text is getting all setup in columns. Well, this text up here has a bunch of formatting applied to it, including the Span Columns feature. For example, I'll click a description, and then up in the Control Panel, I'll make sure my Paragraph Formatting button is selected, so I can see all my paragraph formatting, and way over here on the right side of the Control Panel, you can see that this paragraph is set to Span All columns. Anne-Marie Concepcion talked about this feature in her InDesign Secrets movie, called Fast Layout with Column Spans in Styles.

So, this text is setup to span all columns, the ingredients are setup to span two columns, and the directions are setup to span three columns. Now, all the other style is being done with Rule Below, and Space Before, and just other normal formatting features that we've already talked about in our other InDesign Secrets movies. The key tip here though is that I spent some time to setup each of those styles, and I figured out the pattern of which style would flow into what, and that way I could use that Apply the Next Style feature.

It is a super powerful one when you need to build pages quickly.