Tool shortcuts - InDesign Tutorial

- [Instructor] InDesign has more than 50 tools and options found within the Tools panel, and as you may or may not know, each tool has a specific purpose that it performs, and that you'll need to use depending on your project. Now you use some of these tools more than others, so I'd like to make it easy for you to access the tool that you need when you need it. To do that I'll show you some shortcuts that you can use to access those tools. The first thing I'd like to show you is the shortcut that is associated with each and every tool that you use. So one of the things I'm going to show you here is that if you hover over a tool, for example the Type tool, you're going to notice that in the tooltip there's the letter T in parenthesis. If I hover over the Pen tool, there's the letter P in parenthesis. So without ever accessing the Tools panel using my mouse, I can press p to access the Pen tool, I can press the i key to access the eyedropper, the h key to access the hand, and the v key to access the selection tool. Now I don't expect you to memorize each and every one of these shortcuts, but the tools that you use, you're going to want to understand and remember those tool shortcuts. It's going to make it really easy for you to access them and work more efficiently in your document. Now the other thing I wanted to show you is the Text and Selection shortcuts. Now one of the things that we do consistently in InDesign, is we're consistently switching between the Selection tool and the Type tool. For example, I may want to click on this frame and move it to a new location, but then I want to edit the text within the frame. So one of the things I want to show you is that when you have your Selection tool active, you can simply double-click using the Selection tool, and that's going to automatically switch over to the Type tool so that you could edit the text within that frame. And once you're finished editing the text, to get back to your Selection tool you can simply tap the escape key on your keyboard to go back to your Selection tool. So that is a really helpful tip as you're working in InDesign, because instead of coming over here each and every time and switching your tools, you can just double-click, make your text edit, when you're finished hit the escape key. Now the other thing I wanted to show you is Preview mode. Currently in InDesign I'm in Preview mode, which is essentially hiding all of my non-printing elements in the document. Now sometimes it's important for me to be able to see those elements quickly. Now this icon down here is how you switch from Preview mode back to Normal mode, and vice versa. But instead of coming down here each and every time, as I'm working in InDesign, simply tap the w key to switch back to Normal view, and then tap the w key again, to go back to Preview mode. The only time this is not going to work is that if you're currently clicked inside of some text. If you tap w, you're going to, as you might guess, type a w. So if you ever are in the text editing component and you want to quickly go to Preview or Normal, just hit the escape key first and then you could tap w to switch between Normal and Preview mode. One more thing I'd like to show you is that if we come over here to a table that I currently have one on page 24 of this document, another issue we often run into is when we want to make some changes to the content of a cell. Now this is another tip within a tip if you will, so I'm going to go ahead and put my type cursor next to the word butterfly. The easiest way to select a single cell in InDesign, is to simply tap the escape key when you're clicked inside of a cell. That's going to highlight the entire cell. Now once you have that cell highlighted, I probably want to change the text formatting of this element for some reason. Now the thing you're going to run into however, is that if you come up here to your Fill and click, and choose a color, and I'm just going to increase the tint to 100% here, you're going to notice that instead of formatting the text, I have formatted the cell itself, and that's not what I wanted to do, So I'm going to go ahead and undo that and I'm going to show you this little tip. When you highlight the contents of a cell, if you look right down here the default behavior is that you're formatting the container or the contents of the cell. Now if you look closely, the shortcut is the letter j. And the letter j allows you to toggle between formatting the text and formatting the container. So when you want to change the text within a cell, you can simply hit escape to highlight the cell, tap j to change the focus to the text instead of the container. And now if I come up here and change the fill color to something else, you're going to see that I've formatted the text instead of the container. In no way am I suggesting that you memorize every single shortcut for each and every tool, that would be silly. Even I don't have every tool memorized. What I am suggesting is that based on the way that you work, and the tasks that you perform, determine the tools that you use regularly and memorize those shortcuts for the tools, so that you can work faster and more efficiently when working on your projects.