Adobe Indesign is a powerful software for online page layout. Its benefits are so high that it has become the reference application for professionals who work with these types of documents. Today we present you 5 tricks you can use with Adobe Indesign to improve your productivity.
Create a stylesheet for your styles
Paragraph styles are the most useful feature of InDesign. Integrating this feature can improve productivity and reduce time spent distributing your documents . Besides being very practical, they help you create a better design and save a lot of time. Despite this, many InDesign users do not use them, even when they know about them and understand the benefits.
Creating all the styles in a document can be a lot of effort and may seem like it makes little sense. But styles are very important to keep your design consistent , apply changes effectively, or use features like the table of contents or hyperlinks.
You can start your projects directly from the style sheet, or you can use it as a reference to create your InDesign document and import the styles from the document.
Use InDesign templates
If you frequently work on documents that have the same layout or even content , you may want to expand the style sheet concept, and add master content. A template is an InDesign document that, when opened, opens as a new, untitled document.
Starting your projects from a template has a clear time benefit , but it's also great when working as a team, because it ensures that everyone starts the project from the same place, and with a consistent structure.
Use the primary text option
Most of the time, especially with books or user manuals , the text comes from a pre-formatted document, either as a Word or RTF file. Your job then is to import this text into your document and style it correctly.
If you've done it before, you know how long it takes to get all the pages and text flow right. This task is something that InDesign can do with just a few clicks. You can import the text and let InDesign automatically create the linked text frames and pages .
To do this, you must configure your master pages, create a text frame on each page, thread the text and activate the "Primary text frame" function.
Data fusion
Combining data is a huge time saver , and it's one of the features that many InDesign users don't know about. With the combination of data, you can instantly design hundreds of pages that have a repetitive design, such as business cards, certificates or even catalogs, from a spreadsheet and a template.
The next time you create a catalog, analyze the layout of your document and the location of each information . After that, divide the document into several parts if you need more templates. Finally, have your client fill out an Excel file with the data you need.
Use the styles
What if you've pasted some text and want to set up the styles quickly? This is another time when paragraph styles come to the rescue, making everything easier and faster. With the styles feature you can apply different styles to many selected paragraphs .
These are the 5 best tricks for Adobe Indesign, surely you can get a lot out of them.