Customize the workspace - InDesign Tutorial

- [Narrator] InDesign is a large complex application with lots of tools and panels, so it's important to keep things organized in your workspace, that way you won't waste time searching for the right tool and shuffling things around. And the best way to accomplish this is to create a custom workspace, and that's what we'll do in this movie. By default, InDesign displays the Essentials workspace when you have a document open. This has just a few panels visible, like Pages, Layers, Links, Stroke, Color and Swatches. So it's really not very useful for anyone but folks just getting started with InDesign. Adobe also provides a digital publishing workspace up here in the Workspace menu, and an Interactive for PDF workspace. Both of these are more useful than the bare bones Essentials workspace, but we could do even better by creating our own custom workspace. So let's start with the Interactive for PDF workspace, and make some changes. First, let's close the Sample Buttons and Forms library to save some screen space. And the quickest, easiest way to close one of these docked panels, is to right-click and choose Close. If you ever want to see that library again, you can just go to the buttons and forms panel menu and open it, right here. Let's also close some panels that you probably won't use on a regular basis, like Page Transitions, again I'll just right-click and choose Close. And Color, Gradient. And now to organize the panels a little better, I'll drag Pages in with Links and Layers, and I'll also open the Articles panel from the Window menu and drag it to the top group. I'll close Liquid Layout. I'll move CC Libraries up to the top group. So now we have a nice set of panels here for working with the structure of documents. Next, let's create a set of panels for our formatting content. I'll open my paragraph and character styles by choosing Window, Styles, and either Character Styles or Paragraph Styles. And I'll put them in with Stroke and Swatches. And I'll open the Align panel by choosing Window, Object, and Layout, Align and drag and drop it in. Close the pathfinder. Next, let's a panel group for interactivity features. I'll add buttons and forms to Hyperlinks and Bookmarks. And I'll put Media in there too. And I'll go to the Window menu and choose Interactive, and open the Object States panel. And put that in there. And from that same place I'll add the Animation and Timing panels. I'll close the Swift Preview panel, and replace it with the EPUB Interactivity Preview panel. And I'll make that large and dock it at the bottom by itself. So to me, this order of panels has a nice flow to it. At the top there are panels for setting the overall document structure and assets. Then there's controls for applying formatting to content. And then we have panels for creating, managing and previewing interactivity. And everything is in one tidy column. Finally, I'd like to collapse the panels down to icons to maximize the amount of screen space I have to view my documents. To do that, just drag the left edge of the dock panels over to the right. Now to save this arrangement as a new workspace, I'll go to the Workspace menu at the top of the screen, And choose New Workspace. I'll call this Interactive Documents. Notice there is also an option here to save Menu Customization. I don't often use that, but I do just want to show you how to customize menus. So go ahead and click okay to save our new workspace. And to customize menus, you can go to the Edit menu, and down at the bottom, choose Menus. Now you get a dialogue box with all the menu items in InDesign, and here you can choose to show or hide any items by clicking on one of the eyeball icons under the visibility column. And you can apply a custom color to help you find a particular menu item quickly. So for example, I can go to the Type menu. Tip that open, and scroll down until I see Hyperlinks & Cross-References. Right here. In the color column, I can click and change it from none to something like red. And click okay. And now if I go to the Type menu, I can see Hyperlinks & Cross-References is highlighted in red. Another trick for finding menu items easier is to hold the keys Command + Option + Shift here on the Mac or Control + Alt + Shift on the PC, while you click on the menu. This removes all the subdivisions in the menu and alphabetizes all the items. So I'll hold Command + Option + Shift, and click on Type, and you can see I start out at A and go down to T for Type on a Path. Compare that to how the Type menu looks when I don't hold down those keys and you can see the difference. Now remember we made our menu customization making the Hyperlinks & Cross-References red after we saved our custom workspace. So right now it's not part of the workspace. If I want to get rid of the red highlighting, I can just choose Reset Interactive Documents from the Workspaces menu, or I can choose Show Full Menus. Or if I wanted to incorporate the red highlight into the workspace, I can choose new workspace and give it the same name. Make sure Menu Customization is selected, click okay, and say yes to replace the existing one. And now I can use my new workspace with that menu highlighting. And at any time I can instantly jump back to one of the default workspaces from Adobe just by choosing it from the menu. And go back to my custom workspace. It only takes a few minutes to set up a customized workspace that can save you lots of time over the long run. You can set up any arrangement of panels that makes sense to you, and I think you'll be a happier InDesign user if you do since you'll have everything where you want it to be.