Indesign Secrets

I was having terrible troubles with Data Merge last week because I was getting this message about “the data source file you selected either has no records or is not a supported file format” every time I tried to choose the tab-delimited file that contained my data:

This was just a simple file exported from Excel! I opened the file back up…

When you print a page that is smaller than the paper on which you’re printing, InDesign gives you very little to indicate the page boundary. You could turn on crop marks in the Marks and Bleed pane of the Print dialog box, but that still won’t provide a clear edge from corner to corner. Many […]

I wrote an article about how to create calendars in InDesign Magazine, Issue #21 (December 2007/January 2008). For those of you who haven’t been subscribing, I encourage you to do so; or you can buy that one back issue if you want. The article mentioned templates you could use, but focused primarily on a script by Scott Selberg called CalendarWizard.

There is an old and crusty version on the Adobe Exchange, but I wanted to point out that you can also download the script from this page at indesignmag.com.

Christopher wrote: Do you know how to sort data in a table? From time to time, we need to change around the data in our tables. I always end up manually re-alphabetizing. But I wish I could find a way to sort it like you can in Excel.

Pariah Burke wrote a really good article in the last issue of InDesign Magazine in which he talked about this very thing. I would encourage you to get that article and read it through. But the quick answer is: There’s really no good way to do this, but there are two mediocre ways…

Anne-Marie has presented a session on “The Zen of InDesign Repair” at the last couple of InDesign conferences, and it’s always well-attended. After all, anyone who has been using InDesign for a while knows that sometimes (fortunately not frequently, but sometimes…) files get corrupted, or weird stuff starts happening in the program.
She talked about this […]

Klaus (yes, that Klaus, a frequent commenter here) wrote us:

How can I clear all Overrides globally, throughout a whole document, for all ParaStyles — and not just on an individual spread basis?

You can do this, albeit somewhat tediously, by taking advantage of what most people consider to be a bug in InDesign:

Sarah wrote,

Just wondering if InD (CS3) has anything that will search for overset text? I know when you export it to a pdf it will notify you, but is there a search within InDesign?

There’s a way to search for overset text in an InDesign file, but it’s not on the surface … that is, there’s no user interface for it, like a checkbox in

SJ wrote:

It has been months since any new Exchange plugins have been added. I have to wonder why. Can you give me an answer?

I’ve been wondering the same thing myself, for a long time. Adobe had a somewhat vibrant store of cool plug-ins, scripts, and other materials on their Adobe Exchange site for a couple of years. Then, it all stopped around the end of 2006. Steve Werner noticed that a new “beta” site went live last May, but there was no new content…

Let’s say you’re working on a layout but you need to get a colleague to design a piece of the spread — perhaps a coupon, or a sidebar, or an ad. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could just hand a piece of the layout to them? InDesign CS3 makes this possible by letting you […]

Daniel wrote:

I’ve linked boxes of text throughout a whole document. Is there a quick/simple way to unlink these boxes without losing the formatting/flowing of the text?

Yes! Next question?

Oh, sorry, you want more details? We talked about this a bit back in Podcast Episode 49, but if you skipped that one, here’s the deal:

There is a really slow way, and two fast and easy ways…