From the course: InDesign Secrets

311 Make Word act like InDesign - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

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311 Make Word act like InDesign

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- [Instructor] Make Word act more like InDesign-what? And why should we care? Well we should care because as InDesign users I suspect that most of us have to open a Word file now and again since we're not usually writing the text, we're receiving text. I have an entire title here that's all about using InDesign and Word together since it's such an integral part of page layout. But what I found most annoying about Microsoft Word, and I've been using it since time immemorial is that the keyboard shortcuts I'm so accustomed to in InDesign don't work the same in Word. And some important preferences for what happens with text that I'm used to in InDesign don't work that way in Word. I'm going to show you a few of my favorite tips for making Word act more like InDesign that I think that you'll find quite enjoyable. Now I'm using Word for the Macintosh, the latest version, Word 2016 here in this video and all my tips also work the same mostly for Word for Windows, when they differ I will let you know. And one of the most important differences between Macintosh and Windows is where do you find preferences. On a Macintosh you find Word preferences up here, Word preferences and you can get to the tools menu which has a lot of the things I'm going to be talking about as far as autocorrect and customizing the keyboard is concerned but in Windows, I don't have Windows here but I took a screenshot for you from my computer which does have Windows 10, you have to go to the left-hand column, I don't remember what they call it, I think it's called a file column and from there choose options. And when you choose options you will see all of the preference panels that I'll be talking about as well as customizing the keyboard. You choose customize ribbon here in Windows and then to customize the keyboard come down here to keyboard shortcuts and click customize. I bet you didn't know you could customize keyboard shortcuts in Word. Well, yes, you can. So first let's go to preferences. I'm going to go to preferences and we're going to go to editing view. If you don't like drag and drop text editing which is turned off by default in InDesign, turn it off here. That's when you make a selection and you can drag the selection elsewhere and drop it. People often will do that by accident in Word, not realizing that's what's happening. So you come here to turn it off. And then go back to show all and go to autocorrect. And in autocorrect there's lots of things that you might want to change here. One of them is to go to autoformat as you type and turn off automatically make bulleted and numbered lists. Every time that you hit return with a bullet, it will turn it into a bulleted list. That's often not what you want. If you actually want to put asterisks around a word and you don't want Word to replace that with bold text, turn that off. And the big one is this one right here which I usually turn off on my regular computer, internet and network paths with hyperlinks. You know whenever you type an email address or a URL in word, it turns it into a hyperlink and if you don't like that, turn that off here. If you don't like your editors doing that, show them how to turn it off. And that's it so we'll close that. And the other thing that I like to change, are keyboard shortcuts. For example, zooming in and zooming out. How do you zoom in and zoom out? In Word you have to use this little slider guy. Or there's probably some sort of drop down menu someplace that let's you do it, I like to use command plus and command minus or control plus and control minus on Windows. How can we do that? Aha, by editing the keyboard shortcuts. So on a Mac, to edit the keyboard shortcuts, go to the tools menu and go down to customize keyboard. So you see that you can specify a keyboard shortcut right here. It's kind of like how it's set up in InDesign. In InDesign if you go to edit keyboard shortcuts, there are different sections, like go to the file menu, find the commands in the layout menu and so on and type your new shortcut. Well it's kind of set up the same way. Here are the categories the edit menu, the view menu. In Windows it is quite different because you have to search by ribbon in other words, kind of complicated. What I do in both platforms is find where it says all commands. So here on the Macintosh I scroll all the way down here to where it says all commands and then I can just do a search. And for the zoom it's way down here with the z's. Let's see there's zoom 100, actually it's called view zoom, sorry, not that one so let's just type view zoom. There we go. So view zoom in and view zoom out are what we're looking for. Unfortunately I can't find these on Windows. I just see view zoom 100, 200, two page spread so I'm sorry, but view zoom in we want to be command plus, right, so I come down here to press new keyboard shortcuts and command plus is currently assigned to subscript I don't care, assign and view zoom out, I want it to be command minus or control minus, it's assigned to optional hyphen, I don't care, (laughs) so it works the same way as on the Mac. Okay so we've set our keyboard shortcuts for view zoom in and zoom out, let's click OK and test it out. I want to zoom in, command plus. whoa ho! Command minus, there we go! So now it works like nature intended. Yeah okay that's good. When you ever use zoom out enough then Word puts it in two-page spreads. One more that I'm going to show you and you can have fun with a lot of these other ones is insert picture. So I'm often needing to insert a jpeg or something and I'll go to the insert menu up here and go down to pictures, picture from file. Or you can go to the insert ribbon and choose pictures, picture from file. I want this to be command+D, of course, or control+D. Let's go back up here and do that. Customize keyboard. Go down to all, actually let's just try insert and we'll try it right here. So picture, we're looking for insert picture there it is. Insert picture, yeah, that's the one I think we want. So keyboard shortcut is command or control+D assign to format fonts, yeah, that's fine I can live with that, assign that, click OK and let's try it. So if I press command+D, I get my dialog box. Ah, yes, there's the picture that I want to insert. Isn't that cool? So go ahead, have fun with editing your preferences and creating your own keyboard shortcuts for Word so that when you need to work in Word at least it feels familiar moving and navigating in the program.

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