372 Add or remove columns while editing a story

- [Instructor] I have a text frame here, and you can see the little red icon in the lower right corner, which of course means this is overset. There's too much text to fit this frame. Now one way to make this frame larger is to use Auto-Size. And you can find the Auto-Size feature by choosing the Object menu, and then choosing Text Frame Options. Or you can simply option or alt double click on the text frame with the Selection tool. Up comes the Text Frame Options dialog box, and now I can click on Auto-Size up here at the top.

Now this feature lets you make a text frame grow as you add text to a story. So it won't easily become overset. And normally people set up frames so that they grow vertically, that is they choose height only. But the Auto-Size feature can also make a frame expand in width. I'll change this to width only, and I'm also going to change this anchor point to the left side of the frame. That means lock the left side of the frame and then let it grow or shrink on the right.

Now this width only feature in the Auto-Size tab is usually used for long headlines, but there's another use for this which is pretty cool. You can use it to automatically add or remove columns as you edit a story. Now the key to making this work, is to also change the column setting over here in the General tab. I'm going to change the column setting from fixed number to fixed width. When you have both Auto-Size set to width, and columns set to fixed width, then InDesign will adjust the number of columns for you as you add or remove text.

Let me show you. I'll click okay, and you'll see that this automatically turned into a three column frame. The height of the frame didn't change, and the column width did not change, but InDesign did expand the frame and add another column automatically so that the column widths are all the same. And even better, I'm going to go ahead and double click inside this frame to place my text cursor inside of it. And now I'm going to delete some of this text. You can see that the frame shrinks back down to only two columns.

If I add text back in, I'm just typing some random text in here, you'll see that it grows another column. Now unfortunately there is no max width feature in Auto-Size. So, as you add more text, the frame will actually go right off the side of the page. So you do need to be a little bit careful here. I really wish that Adobe would add a max height and a max width feature to Auto-Size. Nevertheless, this auto add and remove columns feature can be very useful in certain kinds of templated documents.