From the course: InDesign Secrets

275 When the Control panel is missing controls - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

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275 When the Control panel is missing controls

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- [Instructor] I received a worried email from one of my clients who said that he thinks that he has a virus or InDesign is damaged because he's opened up a document and he can't find some important icons going across the top in the control bar, and he thinks the features are missing. One of them that he said was when he switches to the Type tool and he selected some text, he doesn't see the icon for paragraph shading up here. He actually has to switch over to the paragraph formatting controls where he can see the shading control, but he used to be able to see it right here. Another thing that he said was missing was when he selects an object with his selection tool, he doesn't see the dropdown menu of object styles that he normally does, whether he's selected a text frame or an image frame. Now you can't see them on mine either but it's not a glitch, as I explained to this nice man, and after a little bit of probing I found out that he's changed computers. He was using a big iMac at work and now they gave him a laptop, and that is the problem. When you don't have enough pixels to show all of the possible features in the control panel, InDesign just hides them, and when I'm recording this video we have to keep it at a fairly low resolution in order for it to show up right, so we're not seeing those icons here either. But if you're in front of your large monitor you might jump over to InDesign right now and see if you can see more icons in your control panel than me. You probably can if you have a big monitor or you have set up your monitor at a high enough resolution. What I explained to this gentleman is that you can customize what the control panel sees, so that if I really want to be able to get my object style dropdown menu to appear up here in the control panel, I can sacrifice other icons and play around with it that way. Let me show you how you do that. Go to the control panel menu and go down here to Customize. And you can see that by default it's going to try and show everything and there's a lot that it's going to try and show. So here under Object, and right now we're looking at all the object commands because I have the Selection tool selected and something selected out here, you can see that it's supposed to show Object Styles down here but it's not, and that's because there's just not enough room. Let's say that I'm hardly ever working with Flip & Rotate from the control panel. I can hide that and I might also want to turn off something else that I don't use a lot, maybe Text Wrap commands, that's this section right here. Let's see if that gives us enough room. I'll click OK, and it did, there we go. So now that those icons no longer appear in the control panel, I now have access to my dropdown menu of Object Styles. I can always go to Flip & Rotate by going to Object, Transform, and then all those commands are up here. It's just having these shortcut icons up here that is very useful to me. So if you don't have enough room in your control panel to show all of the items that you want, just go to the Customize command and turn off the items that you don't use that often, or that you don't mind going to a panel or a menu to select. Now these things will be saved if you create a custom workspace, so if I go to the Workspace dropdown menu and choose New Workspace, I'll just call this object styles in control panel, then they get saved here. Now if I switch to a different workspace, like Advanced, and I choose Reset Advanced, then they disappear, see, because it is automatically supposed to show the Flip & Rotate and the Text Wrap. I'll go back to my custom workspace and then they come back again. So if this is an issue that you're having, just fiddle with the customization controls for the control panel and save it in a custom workspace.

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