Free Lynda.com Video: Formatting Text Quickly with Apply Next
I have to say I’m disappointed. Here we are, well into the 21st century and instead of having robot servants to do all our work, we seem busier and more stressed than ever, juggling tasks and racing to meet (or at least not completely blow) our deadlines. Forget Iron Man, if Tony Stark would just sell us all copies of J.A.R.V.I.S., he’d save the world.
But alas, the only super heroes I know are David and Ann-Marie, and while they don’t fly, they do possess incredibly powerful tips and techniques for InDesign users. One such technique is on display in the video below, from the InDesignSecrets series at Lynda.com. In the video, David shows how to use the Apply Next feature to save you tons of time while formatting text perfectly and consistently. If you work with long documents, this is Must See Video. Check it out, it just might save your world some day.
Formatting Text Quickly with Apply Next
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Working with Pasteboard Options
Making InDesign Run Faster
Using Spring-loaded Tool Shortcuts
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Quote: “Here we are, well into the 21st century and instead of having robot servants to do all our work…”
Ah, but in all too many cases, those robots don’t do our work. For many people, they take their jobs away and leave them with no work to do. If you want to be depressed, look at this map:
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state
Notice in how many states “truck driver” is the most common job. It’s easily the ‘most common most common’ job. And yes, truck driver must mean more than those driving semis. It includes lots of delivery vans. Now imagine many of those jobs disappearing in an era of self-driving vehicles. And that new technology intrudes into more areas of employment than truck drivers. It means taxi drivers are out of work too. That is a lot of jobs, particularly for immigrants with limited language skills.
So forgive me if I’m not gushing at how much money Google and others are spending to develop this new technology. At times, I want to ascribe their zeal to geeks jealous of burly chested truckers. I like most technological advances, but I hope this one fails utterly and completely. If it starts to go down, look for me to be doing some of the kicking.
Given how badly the autopilots on $300 million, state of the art airliners perform in a crisis, I have my doubts that the systems that’ll be on a $20,000 car will be that capable of dealing with emergencies. This documentary about trouble on a top-of-the-line Airbus 380 illustrates that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7FkTKQ-QRY
It took some very clever pilots to bring that plane home.
Not quite on topic, but it does stress that all job skills aren’t equal. Knowing InDesign may be safer as a long-term job skill than knowing how to drive a van.
I sometimes tell people looking for a career that one of the smartest things they could do would be to subscribe to:
Adobe Creative Cloud at $50/month
Lynda Premium Annual at $30/month
For $80 per month they could give themselves an excellent education in a wealth of creative tools. That’s probably less per year than they’d pay for two or three courses at a community college or one at a major university. I also tell young adults who’re having trouble finding a decent job that those design and layout skills in a business of their own could carry them through the tough times when they can’t find other work.
I’m a baby boomer who feels sorry for today’s young adults. In many ways, their future isn’t likely to be as good as my past and their troubles extend beyond those no trucking jobs. Worse still, many of them don’t seem to be aware of that. They seem to be living in dreamland.