Keyboard Shortcuts In Adobe InDesign CC That Will Change Your Life

Hi there, this video is going to be all about super-duper awesome keyboard shortcuts. Now, I'm going to go through them all here, all the ones that I think are amazing. What I'll do is create a shortcut sheet at the end of this course. So there'll be a PDF that you can download. I don't have it yet, so I haven't made it, but you'll be able to jump out to bringyourownlaptop.com, then click on this button here that says 'Resources'. So here are all my shortcut sheets for other products. You might be using some of these other ones as well, so download those. There's a PDF you can download as well, and print out. Here is an InDesign one here, that's for my Intro course. It's going to have a few other shortcuts we cover here, but I'm going to make a new one for advanced super-duper people.

There's some other InDesign ones down the bottom that I did a long time ago. InDesign one. There's lots of shortcut sheets here under the 'Resources'. Let's go through now, and do them together. Back into InDesign. So the first one I use quite a bit is the 'X' key. So I'm going to click on this guy, I'd like to adjust the Stroke and the Fill. We all know that these little guys here are always too small to click on. The 'X' key just kind of toggles between the two. See, X, X, X, X. So I want the Fill in the front, then the Stroke in the front. So I'm going to have a 'Fill' of red, and a 'Stroke' of yellow. You can see, it's just nice and quick to toggle the X key. That works in Photoshop and Illustrator as well.

Another one to do is, I like the back slash '\' key, so I select on him, and the Fill's in the front, I just hit the forward slash '/' key actually. It's where your question mark is normally. Mine's down next to the period or the full stop. So that's your forward slash, and that just says, clear it out. Have no Fill, you, no Fill, you, no Fill. Just a really easy one. To add a Fill, just hit the comma key, and that fills it in with a Fill. You can use the period key as well to add a Gradient, but nobody wants to add a Gradient. So the main one is the forward slash but if it doesn't have a Fill, you can hit the comma key.

All right, let's get into something a little fancier. I felt like that was going to be a really cool first one, maybe it's not. Another one that I use quite a bit, is 'Command J', or 'Control J' on a PC. We'll go to 'page 1', hit 'Enter'. I know it's not really a shortcut but when you're working with a long document, you're like 'Command J', down to '10', 'Return'. You can turn it into, like a little smooth motion. I find that I use that shortcut quite a bit. It's 'Command J', or 'Control J' on a PC. Another one we've used quite a lot in this course already is 'Command J', go to page 1, I want to make the font size bigger. So I'm going to make this box that it goes into bigger. Then I just hold down the 'Command Shift', then hit the full stop. So if you're on a PC, it's 'Control-Shift-.' Makes the font bigger. And if you use the comma key, gets smaller. It's actually the greater than '>' and the less than '<' key, but I find they're easy to find when you say period and comma. So that's the font up and down.

Leading and Kerning, so let's say I want this collection here to tighten in a little bit instead of going up to here, and finding the tracking in here, I can just hold down the 'Option' key on a Mac or the 'Alt' key on a PC, and just use the left arrow. You can see, just tightens it in. The right arrow opens it up. And you can do it up here later, just via the cursor flashing, the same keys. So 'Option' in and out, or 'Alt' in and out on a PC. Just a bit of a tracking, kerning thing. You can go through and just—

The other one you can do is Leading. So what I'm going to do is break these on to two lines with a 'Return'. What I'm going to do is actually find some text in here. Actually I'll find you on this next page. I'll select these guys, and I could do my Tracking, with left and right, but if I hold 'Option' down or 'Alt' down on a PC, you can play around with the Leading without having to go into, down here, and find this one. So left and right is Tracking, and up and down is the Leading. Now that kind of brings me up to one, I kind of said, between these two, like toggling between these two is a real big pain. It's a hard shortcut to remember, but take your time, write it down, practice it the next week, and you'll save a huge amount of time. And it's basically 'Command-Option-7' on a Mac. And you can see, just toggles between them, super useful. On a PC, it's 'Control-Alt-7'. On for whenever I'm on character, when I want to be on paragraph, whenever I want to be on paragraph, I'm on character. It's always backwards, so I select on here, 'Command-Option-7', and I can get my space after, I can play around with that. And I want to go back to character, and I've got it up here. You might disagree with that one being a shortcut. I use it all the time, toggling between these two.

Let's go to the next one. So the next one is when you're working on documents with Spreads. We probably all know that 'Command 0' will kind of center it. So if you're moving around, you get 'Command 0', just centers the page. Problem is you want to see the whole screen. So what you need to do is hold 'Command-Option-0'. So on a PC, it's 'Control-Option-0'. Just kind of centers the screen. The other thing you might have known, is if you use PgDn, for some reason it just kind of weirdly offsets. It never goes to the next page, it kind of does that, plus a little bit more. So what you can do is, you can hold down 'Option-PgDn'. And it will toggle to the centers of the next word, so good. So if you're on a MacBook Pro, like me, you don't have a PgDn button. So in my case I have to hold down 'Function-Option', then hit the 'Down' button, or the 'Up' button.

Print out the shortcut sheet, write them down, practice them for a little while, if they still don't stick, they were never meant to be, but I find that's a really handy one. Let's jump back into the document we had. Now, let's say I want to bring in some text. I'm going to go down to my page that I'm making. This one here. So I want to bring in some text, so I'm going to go to 'File', 'Place'. And it's some Word document, so I would like to have some-- I want to show the Import option. So I'm going to go to my 'Exercise Files', I'll open up '03 Magazine', and here's the 'Magazine Text'. But I want to turn this on. We all know, if I turn this on, and then I click 'Open', I get the options, which is really cool, but then when I go to bring in my image next, I forget to turn it off and this thing appears, and I'm like "Ah, I'm going to turn it off. I never remember him." It annoys you for long enough, and eventually go off, and go to 'Place' and you turn this thing off.

What if there was a way to turn it on temporarily? There is. All you need to do is, say, I want to bring in 'Magazine Text', hold 'Shift' while you click 'Open', it will give you import options but it only turns it on for that one single time. So now you can go through and do it, and when you go back to 'File', 'Place', you can see, it's still turned off. So just hold 'Shift' when you click on your file, click 'Open' to get some extra options.

The next one is kind of a selection trick, so let's go up to page 1. Now I've got this kind of structure where I've got a QR Code, underneath the QR Code is a gray box, so a black box, underneath that is an image. It's a bit of a, kind of a rigmarole bit of a thing. To get to the image, I need to drag him off, then select on him. So the trick is, with your Black Arrow selected, is hold down the 'Command' key on a Mac, or 'Control' key on a PC, click this top one, that gives you the gray box, click again, and I got the image. Hit 'Delete', that's a way of selecting things underneath each other if there's a pile of stuff on top. So just keep holding the 'Command' key, if I click on him, hold 'Command' key, clicks the black box, then clicks the image and then eventually comes back to the beginning here. So it just cycles through all the different things to click on. A little side note that works in Photoshop as well, which is super handy, especially when you've got loads of layers everywhere.

Next trick is to do with Master pages. Now, on my Master page, on this one, I've got all of these guys, plus this. And it's applied to all the pages, but let's say I want to turn these off on just one of the pages. So let's go down to the last page and let's say I don't need them on this page, but I can't click on them, or can I? Hold down 'Command Shift' on a Mac, or 'Control Shift' on a PC. Just click on them, they get kind of ripped off the Master page, and I can say "Goodbye." Same with him, goodbye. These are still part of the Master page, can't click on them. And if I add anything to my Master page, it will still be part of it, but it's a nice trick to uniquely remove things.

So let's say you've got page numbers on all the pages but this is some that just don't need to be there because there's maybe an ad on it, or something. You can just 'Command Shift', and click on them, or 'Control Shift', click on them, for a PC, and that pulls them out. You could not delete them, you might just change the color of them, or the layer, or something, but it's a great way of dragging them out of the Master page and making them accessible.

Another trick is Power Zoom. Let's go to see them. Let's say we've zoomed in and we're working on New Zealand, because it's awesome. While you zoom out, what you can do is hold the 'space bar'. So the space bar, remember, is our kind of moving around, but if you hold 'space bar', and you click and hold it, kind of zooms out, and you can kind of go over here. So it kind of goes in and out to the same zoom level, which is quite nice. So I can hold my 'space bar', click and hold the mouse, comes up, and I want to look in this one, and this one, and this one. So that's Power Zoom, and it's just to do with space bar. You just hold the mouse key down for a long time, and it will zoom out. That particular one works lots better in Photoshop as well. It's useful, and I know it from Photoshop mainly because when you're retouching, and you're in that close, you can do the exact same thing without having to zoom all the way out, move across, and zoom back in.

The next shortcut is kind of temporarily using one of these tools. Let's say we live our life in the Selection tool, that's the one we use the most, but when we want to use our Rectangle Marking tool, which is the M key, so instead of switching to it, drawing it, and then having to switch back to this, what you can do is just hold the 'M' key down, which is the shortcut for this one. You can kind of see in the brackets there. So if I hold down the 'M' key, I can draw my rectangle, and it just snaps back to the last one you're using. 'Type' tool, hold down the 'T', drag out your Type box, and then let go, and it goes back to the one you were just using, which is this guy. So, 'Zoom' tool, hold down 'Z', draw a box around stuff, let go, and it jumps back. So just hold it down, the shortcut, while you're using it, and then it will snap back to what you had previously.

Now I'm saving this one to the end, because it's the best. It's the most useful one, kind of. Now you got to hold down pretty much all the keys, 'Command-Option-Shift' on a Mac or 'Control-Alt-Shift' on a PC, and what it does is, watch this. If I hold those down, then click on my 'Object' menu, can you see what it's done? It's alphabetized all of my list. Without it on it just goes into this random, not random, but like, we all kind of spend ages going somewhere, and you're trying to find it, but you know what it's called, you know the first letter so hold down 'Command-Option-Shift', click on it. And there he is, all in alphabetical lists. I wish this worked on all the Adobe products, but it doesn't. Just kind of like works in InDesign, for some reason. I love it though, it's a cool little shortcut.

So that's going to be it for our shortcuts. Short and sweet, I know. Let's go through now using our amazing new keyboard shortcuts throughout the rest of this InDesign course.