Getting started

- [Instructor] Our goal in this first section is to get you acquainted enough with InDesign that you can create a new InDesign file or edit one that someone else has made. This is the basics of the basics. Step zero, just the facts ma'am. If your boss handed you a file and you need to open it and do something with it before lunch today, start here. Okay, let's dive in. When you first launch InDesign you'll see this thing called the start work space which gives you quick access to any recently opened documents.

All you need to do is click on one of these to open them. Adobe also displays some tutorials and relevant news down here at the bottom of the start space. And these change from time to time, so take a look at those every now and again. But in this case, we want to create a new file. So I could click the New button here or I could go to the File menu, choose the New submenu, and then choose Document. The New Document dialog box has a lot of options, and I'm going to be covering all of these in a later chapter. But for right now, the first thing you need to think about is does your document have facing pages? That is, does it have a left hand and a right hand page, like a book or a magazine? If it doesn't, then come over here and turn off the Facing Pages checkbox.

Next you want to choose a page size from the Page Size pop-up menu, or you could type in your own values down here. And you can type this in any measurement system you want. For example, I can type 11in here for 11 inches. Now down here we can specify our margins. And these are just guidelines. You can ignore them if you want. In this case I'm just going to click OK and you'll see InDesign creates my new document. Now you can start with an empty InDesign document like this if you want. But I find it's usually easier to start with a template, something that's partially created.

And then you can change the text and graphics as you work. Now I have a template to work with in my exercise files folder. So I'm going to head to the File menu, choose Open, and then I'm going to choose this file called LM_flyer_template. That's the template I'm going to use. Then I'll click Open and InDesign opens it. Now in the next few movies I'll be filling this out by adding text and graphics. Now this template comes with the exercise files, but there are lots of InDesign templates available on the web, including dozens of free ones at indesignsecrets.com which is a site that I run with Anne-Marie Concepcion.

This page for example includes dozens of free templates that you can download and use, including ones to create books, brochures, menus, and more. You can just download them, open them in InDesign, and you're good to go. In this case though, let's switch back to InDesign. Of course, getting your document opened is just the first step on the adventure called InDesign. Next we're going to see how to get text in here and make it look the way you want.