Inserting, deleting, and moving pages

- [Instructor] You can use InDesign to make anything from a one-sided business card to a book thousands of pages long, but as soon as you go beyond that one page business card, you're going to need to learn how to manage your pages. Adding pages, moving them around, deleting them, and so on. And that's what we're going to cover here. All of InDesign's page features show up in two places. First in the Layout menu, underneath the pages sub-menu, and second, inside the Pages panel, over here in the dock. But the Pages panel has all of the features from the menu plus a lot more, so let's focus over here in the panel.

The first thing I'm going to do is change my Pages panel layout, the configuration because currently it shows each spread just one on top of the other. In fact, I'm going to make this Pages panel a little bit larger by clicking and dragging in this lower right corner. I'll just drag this down, and as you can see the panel shows me all the pages in my document, and if I want to go directly to pages, say 24 and 25, all I have to do is click on the numbers below that spread. That takes me right to that spread and centers it in the window.

So the Pages panel is a great way to move from page to page or spread to spread, but this vertical layout in the panel, well, it's just not a very good use of screen real estate. Instead I'm going to open the Pages panel menu. That's this little menu up in the upper right corner, and I'm going to go all the way down to View Pages, this sub-menu down here, and I'm going to choose Horizontally. I just think horizontally is a much better use of space, but you can do it either way you want, vertically or horizontally.

Now I'm going to add a new page by clicking the New Page button down here at the bottom of the panel. Now when I click that, InDesign adds a new page after whatever page is selected in the Pages panel. So now because pages 24 and 25 were selected, the new page shows up right after that over here. There's a new page 26, and you can see if you squint, that it's blank. Now all the other pages in the document from there on have shuffled, so they stay in two-page spreads, and that's because this is a facing pages document.

So now, page 26 is selected. That's the new page I just added, and I could click again to add another blank page to that spread. Now of course, if I knew that I wanted two pages to start with, I probably should have used the Insert Pages feature, and I can get to that by going back to the Pages panel menu and choosing Insert Pages right here at the top. Now this gives me the Insert Pages dialogue box, and I can type in exactly how many pages I want right here. Let's say I want two pages, and I want them to be after page 21.

Now you'll see this Insert popup menu gives me several options. After that page, before the page, or even at the start or end of the document. All right, I'll click OK, and you'll see that it added a new blank spread, right where I wanted it. Another way to get a new page in InDesign is to duplicate one of the pages you already have. Now I find this very useful when I'm laying out pages quickly because I often already have a page that looks approximately like what I want. In this case, I want to make a duplicate of this spread here, again pages 24 and 25.

So I'm going to select both of those pages by clicking once on the numbers underneath the spread, and then, I'm going to hold down the option key on the Mac or the alt key on Windows and drag these numbers until I see a little vertical line appear. When I see that line, it means put it here after the spread. For example, I'll put it down here after pages 28 and 29. There you go. There's my duplicate. Now of course, the Pages panel acts kind of like a slide tray. If you have a bunch of images or slides in a tray, you can move them around anywhere you want, right? So if I wanted the spread to be some place else, I could simply drag the numbers down until I see that little vertical line again.

That vertical line tells me where InDesign is going to drop it, and as soon as I let go of the mouse button, it moves the spread to that location, and all the other pages reshuffle. Now there is another way to move pages too, and that's to go back to the Pages panel menu and choose Move Pages. So for example, if I wanted to move the first spread, pages 20 to 21, I would simply type 20-21, that's the spread or the range, 20 to 21, and I can move it after page 37.

That's at the end of the document. When I click OK, that spread moves all the way down to the end. Now finally, sometimes you find that you need to delete pages, and you can do that in the Pages panel too. For example, I'll just click on page 26 up here, and let's say I want to delete that. So I click once on it, not twice because twice actually goes to that page, but once selects it, and then I can come down here to the bottom of the Pages panel and click the trash can icon. That'll delete it, and once again, all the other pages reflow.

Now a couple of tricks you should know. If I wanted to select a range of pages, for example, from the first page to another page, I'd click on the first one and then hold down the shift key while clicking on the last one. Shift click means select a range from one place to the next. On the other hand, if I want to select more than one page that's not next to each other, then I have to use the command or the control key. First, I'll click down here in an area of the Pages panel where there's no pages. That just deselects everything. Then I'll click on the first one and then hold down the command key on the Mac or control key on Windows and click on the second, and then while that key is still held down on my keyboard, I'll select these two up here.

Now I have all of these pages selected inside my Pages panel, and I can delete them all by clicking on that trash can icon. Now this is really helpful. InDesign is warning me that at least one of these pages has objects on them. I thought these were blank, so I might want to Cancel and go back and review those pages. In this case, I'm just going to go ahead and click OK and let InDesign delete those pages. Now of course, even though these are called pages, and this is the Pages panel, it doesn't necessarily mean print pages. A page in InDesign could be what you see on screen, like a slide presentation or a magazine or a tablet.

Remember a page is a page is a page.