From the course: InDesign: Beyond the Essentials

Saving a workspace - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign: Beyond the Essentials

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Saving a workspace

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It's great that InDesign let's you put your panels anywhere you want on your screen, but honestly, if you have too many panels open at the same time, you're going to have no end of frustration. And also, sometimes, let's say you're editing text, you only want your text-relevant panels open. Other times you may only want your animation panels or your graphics-oriented panels. Fortunately, InDesign has a feature called Workspaces that let's you see just what you want to see when you want to see it. To make a custom workspace, the first thing you need to do is set up your panels the way you want to see them. In this case, I'm going to make my Animation panel disappear, I'll pull my Glyphs panel over into the dock, let's do the same with my Hyperlinks panel, and I'm going to drag my Styles panel over into a second dock. A lot of people don't realize that if you place the cursor just to the right of the document window, you see a blue line, and if I let go there, it's going to create a second dock, or first dock, depending which way you look at it, but that second dock shows up to the left of my primary dock. Now I'm going to click this little double-headed arrow here. That kind of minimizes the panel, so I just see the icon and the name. Now I'm going to drag my Character Styles panel over into that dock, simply by dragging that tab until I see a horizontal blue line underneath Paragraph Styles. That way I have two panels inside that dock. Now I'm going to click that double-headed arrow one more time, which lets me see all my Paragraph Styles listed out and all my Character Styles. I find that really useful when I need to apply a lot of styles quickly to a bunch of different texts in my document. Now that I have my panels just the way I want them on screen, it's time to save my workspace. And I can do that by going to the Window menu and choosing from the Workspace sub-menu, New Workspace. Or instead, if I have the Application Bar visible at the top of the screen, which I usually do, I can choose New Workspace from the Workspace pop-up menu here. It ask me what I want to call my Workspace, I'm going to call this David's Text Workspace. You can call it anything you want really, and then I'll click OK. The best part about making a workspace is switching between that workspace and another one. For example, I can come over here and choose Book workspace, that's actually one that ships with InDesign, and it switches to that workspace. I'll choose Interactive for PDF, and it switches to that workspace. And then, whenever I want to get back to my custom one, I just choose it from the top of this pop-up menu. There it is, my workspace with all the panels exactly the way I want them. And I want to remind you that if I do mess up my workspace in one way or another, for example, I'll pull this panel out, and this panel, and let's choose my Links panel, I can pull that out as well. If I do make a mess of my screen, let's go ahead and choose one more here, it's no big deal, because I can always go back to the original workspace that I saved. To do that I just choose the Workspace sub-menu and I choose Reset. Reset puts it all the way back to the way it was. If you take a little time to create custom workspaces now, you're going to save yourself a lot of time down the road and end up a much happier InDesign user.

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