Inserting, deleting, and moving pages

You can use InDesign to design anything, from a one-sided business card to a book thousands of pages long. But as soon as you go beyond that business card, you're going to need to learn how to manage your pages, adding pages, moving them around, deleting them, and so on. That's what we're going to cover here. All of InDesign's page features show up in two places, the Pages submenu underneath the Layout menu and also the Pages panel. But the Pages panel has everything from the menu, plus a lot more. So let's focus on the panel. The very first thing I'm going to change in my Pages panel is the Layout, the configuration.

Because currently it shows each spread one on top of the other. It's not a very good use of screen real estate. I would rather go to the Pages panel flyout menu, choose View Pages and choose Horizontally. Horizontally is a much better use of space. So I like it more. But you can do it either way you want. I'm going to pan up to the top of this page, the first spread by using Option+Spacebar or Alt+Spacebar, just so I can see what I'm doing here a little bit better. And I'm going to add a new page. There's a new page button, Create new page down here at the bottom of the Pages panel, and if you click that it'll add a single new page after whatever is selected in the Pages panel.

Right now, both pages 20 and 21 are selected. So if I add a new page, it'll add a new page after that spread. All the other pages in the document shuffle, so that they stay in two-page spreads. Now page 22 is selected. That's the new page that I just added, and I can click again to add a second page on that spread. However, if I knew that I wanted two pages to start with, I probably should've used the Insert Pages feature. I can get that from the Pages panel flyout menu, Insert Pages, or little shortcut Option+Click or Alt+Click on the New Pages button.

Option+Click or Alt+Click on Pages button then up comes the Insert Pages dialog box and I can say exactly how many pages I want to add, and where I want to put them. Perhaps I want to put one page right after page 20. No problem, click OK and it adds a new page after page 20. Another way to get a new page in InDesign is to duplicate one of the pages you already have. I find this very useful when I'm laying out pages quickly, because often, I have a page that looks approximately like what I want, but I need to make a few changes. So I'll just duplicate the one that I have.

I'll hold down the Option Key or Alt Key on Windows and drag. In this case, I want a duplicate of both of these pages, pages 22 and 23. So I'll click on the page numbers at the bottom, that selects both the pages, and then I'll hold down Option or Alt and drag, until I see a black line appear. That means put it here after the spread, and when I let go, I get a duplicate of that spread right where I wanted it. Of course the pages in this Pages panel act kind of like a slide tray, if you've a bunch of images or slides in a tray, you can move them around anywhere you want.

So if I want this spread to be someplace else, I simply click it and drag it and move it to where I want it to be, and all the pages reflow. There's another way to move pages too, and that is to select Move Pages from the Pages panel flyout menu. I'll choose Move Pages and now I can specify exactly which pages I want to move and where I want to move them to. For example, I might want to move pages 23 and 24 to later, after page 25. I can choose After a specific Page, Before the Page or at the beginning or end of the document.

Click OK, and you can see that those pages got moved, and again all the pages reflowed to take their place. Finally, sometimes you find you need to delete pages, and you can do that in the Pages panel too. I'll select this second page of the document, and I want to grab these other blank pages I have. So I'm going to hold down the Command Key or the Ctrl Key and click on them. The Command+Click or Ctrl+Click, means select discontinuous pages. That means pages that are not next to each other. If you hold down the Shift Key, you can actually select continuous pages, a range of pages.

For example, I'll select page 20, and then I'll Shift+Click on page 29 and I'll get all of the pages in between. But in this case, I don't want that, so let me click out here where there's no pages and then once again click on the first one, and then Command+Click or Ctrl+Click on these other blank pages, and then to delete them I click on the trashcan. It warns me, Are you sure you want to delete those? Yes, I do. Click OK and now they're all gone. Now remember, that even though these are called pages, and this is the Pages panel, it doesn't necessarily mean Print Pages.

A page in InDesign could also be what you see on a screen, like a slide presentation or a magazine on a tablet. A page, is a page, is a page.