From the course: Cert Prep: Adobe Certified Associate - InDesign

Use elements of the InDesign interface - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: Cert Prep: Adobe Certified Associate - InDesign

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Use elements of the InDesign interface

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- [Instructor] The ACA exam includes many questions where you have to demonstrate your ability to use InDesign's features and controls. So let's do a quick tour of the user interface. At the top of the screen, InDesign has several menus where you can choose commands and open other parts of the interface, like dialog boxes and panels. Menu items that are going to open dialog boxes have an ellipses after their name. So, for example, file, new, document, opens the new document dialog box. And dialog boxes are what we call modal, meaning that while they're open you can't do anything outside of them in InDesign. You have to close a dialog box to use other features. Panels are different. in that they have controls that you can use to change some aspect of your document. To see a few more panels, I'll go to the workspace menu and choose essentials classic. And I can open the swatches panel here. And leave it on screen while I do other things. Panels can also be rearranged to your liking. You can open them from the window menu. I'll just open one like effects, and panels can be docked by themselves to the side of the screen. Or with groups of other panels. And you can drag them off and put them anywhere. And close them. You can also save a custom arrangement of panels as a workspace, as we'll see in another movie. There are a few special panels that are a bit different from the others. One is the properties panel, which I'll open from the window menu. And the other is the control panel, And the features that appear in both the control panel and the properties panel are dynamic, and depend on what you have selected in the document. So if I take the type tool, and select some text, I get access to the character and paragraph features Or if I switch to the selection tool to select the text frame, I get all kinds of controls to modify frames in both panels. and here you have access to tools for selecting objects. A tool for changing page sizes. A tool for adjusting the space between page items. For collecting and placing copies of page content. For drawing lines and paths. For creating new objects. For editing paths and transforming objects. For applying gradients and gradient feather effects. For adding editorial notes. For copying and pasting colors and other formatting, to and from page items. And tools for adjusting the view and navigating. And there are also controls here for working with fill and stroke colors. And the various screen modes, like preview mode. And presentation mode. I'll switch back to the preview mode by pressing the escape key. Now let's take a look at some of the most important panels in InDesign, and review what they're used for. The pages panel is where you can add, move and delete pages. You can also create master pages and apply them to document pages. And I can see that I have the A master applied to my document pages here. The layers panel gives you the ability to organize content into separate layers. The links panel is where you manage linked files that have been placed into the InDesign document. Things like photos and graphics, audio and video, and even text and spreadsheets, When you select a file in the layout, in the link info section of the panel. So if I click on this photo with the selection tool and expand the link info section, I can see all that information. Many of the controls in other panels, like stroke, color and swatches, can also be found in the properties panel, when you have an object selected. And there are many more panels that you can access in the window menu. Note that some of them are grouped into categories, like editorial, interactive, output, styles and so on. output, styles and so on. Okay, that was our tour of the InDesign interface. Okay, that was our tour of the InDesign interface. It's one of the most fundamental objectives to study It's one of the most fundamental objectives to study for the ACA exam, and it's very important for the ACA exam, and it's very important because you will need to demonstrate your ability because you will need to demonstrate your ability to use the InDesign controls to use the InDesign controls in the hands-on part of the test. in the hands-on part of the test.

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