Podcast 109 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 109 page.
[music]
David Blatner: Welcome to InDesign Secrets Episode 109. I’m David Blatner. I’m here along with my cohost, Anne-Marie Conception.
Anne-Marie Concepcion: Hi, David. How are you?
David: I am well. Very well. It’s a beautiful day here in Seattle, Washington. How about there? How’s Chicago?
Anne-Marie: It is probably one of the most beautiful days we’ve had all year. It’s about 75 degrees, sunny, slight breeze. It’s gorgeous.
David: Incredible. Wow. I’ll be right over.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: [laughs] Our podcast and blog at InDesignSecrets.com are the independent resource for all things InDesign.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. That’s right, and coming up on today’s show, [sings] Happy Birthday, InDesign.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: We’ll talk about some memories from the birthday of InDesign. Also, the main topic of today’s show is Microsoft Word and InDesign, because probably one of the most frequently voiced issues or complaints about InDesign users is having to work with Word files and getting them to work correctly in all their styles. Well, David and I are going to share what we think are the most essential tips for making sure that Word files work as you want them to work in InDesign. And the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week…
Anne-Marie: Eekeekeekeekeek.
Anne-Marie: …is Select All Unused.
David: Yes, indeed. That’s going to be fun. Select All Unused, but “unused what?” you might ask. Well, you’ll find out at the end of today’s show, but before we get to that we’re going to talk about our sponsors. We’ve got two wonderful sponsors this episode. The first is Certitec, an excellent UKbased training firm. They’re based out of London and Cardiff, and they are awesome. You’ve got to check them out. If you want InDesign training, Acrobat training, you must go check them out at Certitec.com. We have a link to their site on our show notes.
But even cooler, they’re going to be doing a drawing. They’re giving away one free two day InDesign class to one lucky InDesignSecrets.com listener or reader, and the classes are going to be held either in Cardiff or London.
If you want to enter for that drawing, you have to go to Certitec.com/InDesignSecrets.html, and of course we’ll have that link in our show notes. Fill out the form and good luck for getting that training. We’ve had a number of other people win that, and they have been very happy with the Certitec training. So, check it out.
Anne-Marie: But, you only have two weeks to fill out the form by the time this podcast is published. So, if you’re listening to this in 2012, it’s too late. Sorry.
David: [laughs] It’s true. Too late. But, definitely if you’re anywhere in the UK, do check out Certitec, even if it is 2012…
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: …or beyond.
Anne-Marie: And InTools has a special deal for InDesign Secrets fans. We’ve been talking about them because they’ve been a frequent sponsor this year. That’s Harbs and his company. They do the suite of really cool scripts and plugins for InDesign and for InDesign ME that automates a lot of production tasks. You can get $20 off the price for either one of their plugin bundles, InBook or InSefer, if you purchase from a special page on their site. You can’t just go right there. You have to follow the link, which we’ll have in our show notes.
David: Excellent. Excellent. OK.
Anne-Marie: So [sings] Happy Birthday, InDesign.
David: [laughs] It’s true.
Anne-Marie: [sings] You look like a page layout program, and you smell like one, too! [laughter]
David: InDesign is ten years old. It’s incredible!
Anne-Marie: The press release announcing InDesign 1.0 was August 31, 1999.
David: Yes, and then 1.0 shipped, and the whole world went “uh.” [laughs]
Anne-Marie: Yawn. Oh, sorry!
David: Yeah, it was really a big yawn when it came out. There was sort of an excitement like, “Oh, wow! There’s something new. There’s competition.” But then when you looked at it, you were like, “OK now.”
Anne-Marie: It would be as though some company came out with a page layout program now, and everybody’s using InDesign. It’s like, well, do you really want to switch your entire production over to another program? And I don’t know if a lot of people had any high hopes for it, but you certainly did.
David: I had hopes insofar as I saw a little gem in the rough, and very, very rough. 1.0 was really unusable in my opinion for any kind of real work. If somebody today came out with a new page layout program, it would have to be just stunningly great, right? You’d think that nobody would even release something unless it was just head and shoulders above InDesign. Well, I don’t even know what that would look like. [laughs]
But, when InDesign 1.0 came out, it was like, “Well, they have a nice kind of interesting little tool there, and it has some cool features.”
But, it was missing a huge amount of stuff. There was no text on a path. It was very slow. It was painfully slow, and so a number of people thought that they shouldn’t have even released it. They should have just put it out as a public beta or something.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, it didn’t support color. It could only do 16 pages long.
David: No, no. [laughter]
David: It was not quite that bad.
Anne-Marie: That’s PageMaker.
David: That was PageMaker. Those were the good old days.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: That’s true. Early, early PageMaker. So, it was good. There’s so many things I remember about the early days of InDesign.
Anne-Marie: Just one thing.
David: If I could pick one thing, that one thing would have to be when Quark actually hired me to demo InDesign. It was a funny moment because Quark usually had me out to speak at their annual conference, and I said, “OK, sure. I’ll come out to Colorado. I’ll speak at your conference.” And they said, “We want you to demo InDesign.” It was like InDesign 1.0, or it might have been 1.5 at that point. I said, “You want me to demo InDesign at your QuarkXPress conference?” They said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course we want you to say nice things about QuarkXPress and how you would always want to use QuarkXPress and not InDesign. But, you need to show InDesign.”
And I was just kind of floored. On the one side, I wanted the job. I didn’t want to say no to a potential client. But, on the other hand, it was like, “This is insane.” It was one of the craziest things Quark ever did. So, I checked it out. I said, “You really, really want me to show InDesign to your biggest customer base?” They said, “Yeah, yeah. We really do.”
Anne-Marie: How did they know that you knew InDesign, that you knew enough to demo it?
David: I had recently written a review about it in Publish Magazine. I had a review on InDesign. I think I did the 1.5 InDesign review for MacWorld. So, people knew that I was aware of InDesign, and they knew that I had mixed feelings about it. I’m sure I had told people at Quark that I had used it and it’s pretty cool, but it’s pretty clunky, too, and very slow. So, I think they just wanted me to say that to everybody, and I was very honest. I said, “Look, if you want me to talk about this, I have to be really honest about it.” They said, “OK. That’s fine. We want you to be honest.”
So, I told people that it was an interesting new page layout program. It had some interesting cool technology, but at this point I certainly would continue using QuarkXPress, which was absolutely true back then. But, you can’t help, even in 1.0, you couldn’t help looking at it and getting a demo and saying, “Oh, there’s some really interesting things they’re doing there,” like even back in 1.0 they had their display postscript functionality. Who knows, like the high quality display where you could import something and see it at really high quality on the screen.
Yeah, it was slow, but you knew that.
Anne-Marie: You know, ten years ago, I was oblivious, oblivious to InDesign.
David: Oh, really?
Anne-Marie: So, I have no birthday memories to share.
David: Oh.
Anne-Marie: I was deeply entrenched in teaching Quark, Photoshop and Illustrator.
David: Yeah, yeah.
Anne-Marie: And using Quark for all of my client projects and couldn’t care less about InDesign 1.0. Not as entrenched, I guess, I didn’t have a blog and a podcast about Quark, but still I was writing manuals for Quark extension developers, speaking about Quark at different venues, writing articles about Quark. I was writing mega articles about Quark, teaching QPS, the Quark Publishing System, you know what I mean. I was highly involved. I don’t think that Adobe, there’s people from Adobe that were mailing me fully, not for release or what do they call it, NFR copies of the software.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: I remember getting, I had like 1.5 and 2.0 sitting on my book shelves gathering dust. They had basically been sitting there for months, and I just didn’t pay attention. I was using Quark five in classic on my old Sun computer, and finally one of my freelancers, my favorite freelancer said, “I can’t believe you’re not using InDesign. I thought that you were all up to date with stuff.” And I was like, “Ahh, maybe, I should check it out.” I hated it at first. It smelled like PageMaker to me.
David: Ah, yeah.
Anne-Marie: So, I wasn’t that impressed with it in the beginning, but the very first project that I did with it, this is my first memory, my first good memory of it was the very first project that I did with it. Of course, I had drop shadows and, of course, I had layered Photoshop files inside the project, and then I sent my printer one in the InDesign package, you know, not a PDF a PDF but also the InDesign package. And I sent it to them at four o’clock in the afternoon, I remember, and this thing was going to be reprinted 250,000 pieces. So, I was nervous, and I put all these notes all over my message on the InDesign piece saying, “You know, I work from home. Here’s my phone number. If something goes blooey on the press or something goes wrong with the film, because they were going to send me the proof, please call me anytime if you’re missing anything. I can get rid of all the drop shadows.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: I went to bed. I woke up the next day, no calls, no emails from them. So, I called the press, the printer, like at nine in the morning and said, “So, what happened? Have you had a chance to run the job? Does it look OK?” He says, “We’re sending over the color proof to you right now. The guy’s on his way.” I’m like, “You’re kidding? Were there any problems?” He says, “No.”
David: Great.
Anne-Marie: It was beautiful. I said, “Wow.”
David: It worked.
Anne-Marie: I was just bowled over that he… I tried all the fancy googas in the program, and then this printer had had no problems.
David: That’s awesome.
Anne-Marie: That was good.
David: You know, it’s been an amazing 10 years. We don’t need to go over all of them. There’s a lot of stuff that’s changed over 10 years, obviously, and here we are at CS4 and looking into the future. The future is bright, so bright I’ve got to wear shades, right? It’s going to be good stuff. I’m really pleased with the direction that Adobe has been going in recent years. It’s good. We just wanted to say happy birthday to InDesign. It’s been a good 10 years, and obviously we have, no matter what we thought in the early days, we have fallen in love deep, and we’re happy to be doing it. It’s exciting, OK.
Now, we should probably talk about something else, something real about this product.
Anne-Marie: I suppose but, you know, one last thing that I was thinking, what are we going to be talking about 10 years from now?
David: Ohh.
Anne-Marie: On the 20th anniversary.
David: That one, I’ll have to think about.
Anne-Marie: That would be like CS11.
David: Yeah, yeah.
Anne-Marie: We’ll be using it in outer space.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: Our robots will be using it.
David: That’s right. I’ll put on my jet pack and shoot up into space to use InDesign.
Anne-Marie: All right, we won’t even need paper, ink. It’ll just be like telepathically publishing.
David: There’s only one thing that is for sure about work flow with InDesign in CS11 10 years from now. That is, people will still be using Microsoft Word with InDesign.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] Right. Microsoft Word, right 2019…
David: And they’re still going to be banging their heads against the walls to get it to work.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] All right. Our favorite tips, our favorite tips.
David: OK.
Anne-Marie: Somebody gives you a Word file. This is the most common complaint I hear is I bring in the Word file and I apply style and it doesn’t take or everything is overridden or I get all these pink things, or it’s just a nightmare. So, I have to remove all formatting and then reapply it one by one. I have to have a printout of the Word document and reapply all the bolds, italics and so forth. That’s probably the most common thing I hear. So, I have a couple of workarounds for that. I don’t know how many people realize, but when you bring in a Word document there is another option in the Creative Suite versions of InDesign. Other than just strip all the formatting or keep all the formatting, there is a third happy compromise which is strip all the formatting but keep the local overrides.
That works for me, at least, about 85 percent of the time. That means remove all the stupid styles. I don’t want any styles coming in, no disc icons showing up in my style’s panel, but if somebody applied bold or italic to a couple words or phrase, keep that. That way, I can apply my title or my body copy style to a paragraph and the italic text that’s in there remains italic, only in my body style.
The only time you get that dreaded pinking is when somebody applied a bold or italic to something or super script or any of those local formatting things. And then when you apply your style it’s looking for fractor italic and you don’t have fractor italic. You have fractor oblique.
Sometimes, it works. Helvetica will work fine. Sometimes, it knows that italic and oblique are about the same, but other times it isn’t. So, in that case, it’s just a simple matter of using fine change or character styles. I can’t remember the last time I’ve ever had to reapply by hand my bold and italic.
David: That’s interesting. We’ve talked about this in the past. I am vigilant about making sure all the bolds and italics throughout the document are using character styles.
Anne-Marie: In Word? You do that in Word before you bring it in?
David: No, I usually don’t. I usually bring that in and then apply the character styles in InDesign using fine change. I’ll go through and use the fine change, or I’ll use a little plugin.
Anne-Marie: Or how about those scripts?
David: Yeah, there are scripts that will let you do it, and there’s also a plugin, which I’m not allowed to talk about yet, but we will pretty soon that actually makes it way, way easier. So, I’m really vigilant about using character styles for all of that local formatting, and then the rest of the stuff can get stripped out. As long as the character styles remain, it’s all good. It’s clean. But, you know, as much as possible, I prefer to clean stuff up in Word. I want to try and have a nice, clean Word file because my feeling is it’s the old garbage in garbage out kind of thing. So, I want to try and minimize the garbage in Word before it even gets to InDesign.
Anne-Marie: OK, so what do you do?
David: Well, a number of things. First of all, I always go through the Word file and make sure that the styles are set up the way I mean, I would rather have styles in Word and bring those styles into InDesign. That is really interesting to hear you talk about stripping those styles out. I can see that that could be useful in some situations, especially if people have really messed up the formatting in Word. I try and make sure all the styles are set up and applied and there is no special, weird stuff on top of it in Word. One of the things that I will often do, people will often send me files that have hyperlinks in them and I don’t want those hyperlinks to come across to InDesign for some reason, especially for a print thing.
Sometimes I want them to come in and that’s nice that InDesign can read them, but for some reason I typically just want to get rid of them. There is a wonderful, cool shortcut that you may have taught me a while ago. I don’t know when this was, years ago. You probably just said, “Oh, yeah just do a command six or a control six.”
Anne-Marie: I think I wrote one of my first blog posts, in 2006, was about this. Somebody commented and said, you can just do this. We got it from somebody who actually added a comment to a blog post.
David: Oh, OK, I’d forgotten. But, if you want to get rid of all of the links; Word will automatically turn anything that looks like a hyperlink into a hyperlink, which I just find frustrating. I turn that preference off in Word. If I get a file and I want to strip out the hyperlinks, leave the text, but strip out the links, the actual hyperlinks; just select everything and do a command six or control six. And it’s just gone. It’s awesome.
Anne-Marie: It’s amazing. It works on Windows and Macs and it’s not the six on the keypad, it’s the six going across the top of the keyboard. That’s important.
David: Ah!
Anne-Marie: Command or control six. It’s just amazing. The problem, sometimes, with styles in a Word document is that people aren’t using styles correctly. I know it’s hard to believe, and it would be difficult. If they have, sort of, used them correctly sometimes even then when you bring them into… if you want to retain styles in your InDesign document, you want to retain styles that have been formatted but want to replace them with InDesign styles the best way to do that is with the Microsoft Word import options dialog box. You choose customize style import. Right?
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: At the bottom. A lot of times people miss that because it should say map Word styles to InDesign styles. That should be the name of this command, but it’s not, it says customize style import. The button does say style mapping so it could be a lot clearer. The problem is that when you click style mapping, for a lot of Word documents that come my way, the list of Microsoft Word styles on the left is huge. I know that they did not use all of those styles. I’m looking at one now that says this document has level one, level two, level three, level four and level five. I know it does not. The answer is, if you see that, cancel out of the import options dialog box. Then what you do is place the Word file into a new, temporary InDesign document. Place it with all of the styles, right? Then you export, you don’t have to autoflow, just get everything into one text frame. Then click inside that text frame and choose file, export and export to richtext format.
David: Great.
Anne-Marie: All right? This is a way of, sort of, cleaning out all the garbage style information. You export to RTF then close your temporary InDesign document and go back to the original document. This time, try again. Place it, choose custom style import, and then you’ll see the actual four or five styles that the program actually uses. I’ve tried opening in Word and saving it as RTF. In Word, it makes no difference, it still opens all the styles. Exporting to RTF from InDesign is a great workaround. I think it is related to this other tip that I have to get in here which is called “maggying” the file.
David: [laughter] “Maggying” the file?
Anne-Marie: Named after a woman named Maggie who is on an editorial list serve that I follow. The world’s best Word experts are editors.
David: Editors and writers, of course.
Anne-Marie: I follow that just because of my InCopy work. This person said that they discovered, buried in a Microsoft Word support page on the website, that the empty paragraph returns that you see in a Microsoft Word document carry a lot of style information for the preceding paragraph. I, kind of, remember that from when I was first learning Word. You can copy and paste an empty paragraph style and it would format the paragraph.
David: The empty paragraph return? The empty character?
Anne-Marie: The invisible character. Exactly.
David: OK.
Anne-Marie: At the very end of a document, the very final paragraph return has the history of all formatting that has ever been applied to that document.
David: Wow.
Anne-Marie: If you ever place a Word document and it crashes or won’t print or something goes blooey like one particular paragraph is having issues I’ve seen this, actually with my client files the answer is to “Maggie” the file. Open it up in Microsoft Word, select all the text except for the final carriage return.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Copy it and create a new Word document; paste it, save it and use that one. So, you have, kind of, done a little surgery. You have the exact, same document except that you don’t have that final paragraph return that could possible have all this corrupted information in it.
David: Wow.
Anne-Marie: That has really saved my bacon, and my client’s bacon, more than twice. It actually works.
David: Wow, that is trippy.
Anne-Marie: Right. So, this woman, apparently, reported it on the editorial list serve a couple years ago. Ever since then if they say, “I have this Word document and my TOC won’t work,” and they’re like “have you tried “maggying” the file?” “Oh, yeah that works, thanks. That fixed it, appreciate it.” I was like, what is “maggying” the file? They told me this lore and now I use it with my files and my client files and I thought I’d pass it along.
David: That’s excellent.
Anne-Marie: It really works.
David: That’s excellent. You know, it’s hard to turn into a verb; for a person to become a verb, but she did it. She made the transition. That’s incredible.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: Go Maggie. So, “maggying” the Word file?
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: All right, that is an excellent tip. You know, I’m realizing we have so many things, I just thought of six more things that we should talk about in terms of Word to InDesign. I think we’re going to have to do another podcast on this.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: Just jump… To be continued…
Anne-Marie: All right, that sounds good.
David: Let’s just keep doing them. We’ll do more next time, but in the meantime we better move on and talk about a few other things but that is an excellent tip. Thank you. “Maggying” the Word document. Fascinating. We are going to be talking, not that you [laughs]. We are going to be doing even more talking in various places. For example, we have some live seminars coming up. I’m going to be in St. Louis, Missouri in a couple of weeks. You are going to be talking in Milwaukee. I know that many of you listening don’t know where Milwaukee is but that’s OK.
Anne-Marie: Boo, hiss. I don’t think so. I think people know where Milwaukee is. There is a big, isn’t there a big football team or baseball team? There is some sort of big team there. If you follow sports you know Milwaukee. Also, there is beer. There is a whole beer named after the town, Old Milwaukee beer. What about that?
David: Raise your hand if you have no idea where Milwaukee is.
Anne-Marie: That is awful, really.
David: Nothing against people in Milwaukee. I’m just saying that people in Prague might not know where Milwaukee is and that’s OK.
Anne-Marie: OK, fine.
David: OK. We’ll put a link to a map…
Anne-Marie: All right, fine.
David: … of where Milwaukee is.
Anne-Marie: If people in Prague know where Seattle is, then they know where Milwaukee is.
David: Where’s Seattle?
Anne-Marie: Seattle is a smaller town than Milwaukee.
David: That’s true, but… OK, well, we’re just going to leave it right there.
Anne-Marie: Whatever.
David: In the meantime, if you happen to be anywhere near St. Louis or Milwaukee, come see us speak. We’ve got links on the show notes about the seminars we’re going to be doing there: Tips and Tricks and InCopy and all kinds of good stuff. The other thing that’s happening this month is Anne-Marie is going to be doing two InCopy seminars, webinars, eSeminars…
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: …whatever you want to call them online in your web browser. So, check those out. They’re going to be really cool. The first one is all about if you want to know about InCopy. Is InCopy right for you? Bring your editor or if you’re an editor listening, bring your designer. And check it out.
Anne-Marie: That’s Right.
David: It’s going to be quite, quite good. And the second one is going to be all about…
Anne-Marie: Tips and tricks.
David: Tips and tricks, if you are already using InCopy.
Anne-Marie: For people who are already using InCopy.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: We’ve got people signed up for both, so hurry up, because there is not that many seats left. I think about 300, so… sign up.
David: There we go. Also, we’ve been doing all these other webinars. Fritz did one. Dan Burns has done one. Steve Werner… We’ve got a bunch of other seminars that we’ve done. And we have now made those all available. I think they’re all now available, or most of them are now available, as recordings. You can buy a ticket to watch the recordings of those. It’s just like being there live, to be honest, except you can’t ask questions at the end. But, other than that, it’s as though you were there live, so we will have links to those in the show notes, as well.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: Check those out. There’s seminars on tables, on grep, troubleshooting.
Anne-Marie: Troubleshooting.
David: Yep.
Anne-Marie: That’s a good one.
David: Best practices for printing. If you’re a beginner or you know a beginner, point them to InDesign 101 webinar. And, of course, Fritz’s great typography deep dive…
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: … where he talks a lot about InDesign’s typography. So, all of those are available, lots of training available, at InDesign Secrets.com.
Anne-Marie: We’re working on creating a dedicated page on the blog to list all of these.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: But for now, we’ll put a link in the show notes to them.
David: Cool.
Anne-Marie: OK. All right. I think it’s time, don’t you?
David: It is. I do.
Anne-Marie: For the Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week.
David: Week, week, week. [laughter]
Anne-Marie: All right.
David: “Select All Unused.” Where is that? Where is “Select All Unused”?
Anne-Marie: “Select All Unused,” well, the first time that you mentioned it, how about this one? I’m like, “Yeah.” I thought it was only it one place, actually, in First Class, which was in the swatches panel.
David: Ah. Where in the swatches panel?
Anne-Marie: In the swatches panel menu.
David: Yeah, the fly out menu.
Anne-Marie: The fly out menu.
David: Where a lot of people don’t look. You’ve got to check out those fly out menus.
Anne-Marie: “Select All Unused.” And I’m used to it, because I think I first used that in Illustrator. I used to use that a lot in Illustrator to get rid of all the… Because it would come with a whole bunch of swatches that really I didn’t care about and I want to see which were the swatches that were actually being used in Illustrator. But, it’s a good cleanup step in InDesign, as well: “Select All Unused.”
David: Yep, yep.
Anne-Marie: But, it’s actually in many other places.
David: It is. It shows up in the Paragraph Styles fly out menu and the Character Styles fly out menu. It’s a great way to clean up a file that, for example, in the document you talked about, where you might have lots of… You were talking about a Word document…
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: …but I see InDesign documents like that too, where there’s like fifty paragraph styles and I know they’re only using four.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: Just get rid of all that other stuff.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: You can just “Select All Unused” from the Paragraph Styles panel fly out menu. It also shows up in, I think, all the styles. Probably Object Styles…
Anne-Marie: Yes, it does.
David: … fly out menu. Anywhere you’ve got a list inside a panel, typically, you can… Well, I guess not everywhere, but a lot of those you do, if they’re styles. One of the super obscure ones that I noticed recently was in the Layers Panel. The Layers Panel does not have a “Select All Unused Layers.”
Anne-Marie: It has a “Delete All Unused.”
David: Yeah, you’re right. They’ve got a “Delete All Unused Layers” feature. I have to admit that I didn’t even see that there until we started playing around with this. “Delete Unused Layers,” that’s really obscure, but it’s wonderful. If you have lots of lots of layers and you don’t know if there are objects on those layers or not, it will check to see and if there is nothing on that layer, it’ll just delete it. That’s pretty nifty. I like that.
Anne-Marie: Why do you think that they didn’t do that with the other ones? Why doesn’t it say, instead of “Select All Unused Styles,” it doesn’t just say “Delete All Unused?” Is it just like a fail safe, do you think?
David: Yeah, I think there are times… For example, I sometimes use “Select All Unused Styles” when I’m not really intending to delete them. I just want to find out what hasn’t been used. Here’s an old… Going back to the Word discussion, a Word trick, sometimes I’ll want to give a Word user a document that they can use as a template with all my styles in it. So, I’ve got an InDesign file that I’ve set up with all my styles: Heading One, Heading Two, and so on. And I want to give them a Word file that has all of my styles, so they can use it as a template, apply their styles, and bring it back to me. The names will match exactly and so on. So, I’ll create an InDesign document with one paragraph, just random text, with a paragraph style applied to that paragraph. Right?
Anne-Marie: Yes, right.
David: I will go through and assign each one of those and I’ll get half way through and I’m like, “Which ones have I assigned yet?” So, I can just go to Paragraph Styles, the panel fly out menu, and choose “Select Unused” and I’ll see these four I missed. Good.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: So then I can apply those four. That’s an example of when I wouldn’t want to delete them, but I do want to find out what hasn’t been used yet.
Anne-Marie: OK.
David: Edge case, but there you go. That is “Select All Unused.” It’s important to know about. Keep an eye out for it. And even more important, keep an eye out for those fly out menus, because I still find people who they look at the panel, but they don’t look at the panel menu.
Anne-Marie: It’s Adobe’s fault. That’s why.
David: Well, they don’t make it easy.
Anne-Marie: They changed the icon. What was wrong with the old icon? The circle with the little triangle in it?
David: Well, remember, they have to keep changing the icons…
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: … to keep people like us in business.
Anne-Marie: [laughs] It must be some government contractor that they have to keep employed. They give him busy work. Let’s change the icon. I wonder what the CS5 one is going to look like now.
David: Exactly. [laughs]
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: It’ll just be blank. You won’t even know it’s there.
Anne-Marie: Right. [laughs]
David: But, you’ll have to hold down CommandOptionShift to get it.
Anne-Marie: You know what would be cool to be get… Do you remember I used to have this curse, this thing in my old Mac. It was in the menu bar. It was one eye ball or two eye balls.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: And the pupil would follow your cursor around?
David: Yeah, yeah, I remember those.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, so just have a set of eye balls there.
David: Good idea.
Anne-Marie: That would sort of just keep looking off to the left like, “Hey, buddy…”
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: “Psst. Psst. Hey, buddy.” Looking off like, “Hey I’m over here. I’ve got a menu over here.” [laughs]
David: Note to self: do not put Anne-Marie in charge of UI for CS5. [laughs]
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: Anyway.
Anne-Marie: Well, that’s it. That is it for episode 109.
David: Yeah.
Anne-Marie: Be sure to check out the show notes on our blog at InDesignSecrets.com where we’ll have links to all the places and webinars we mentioned and also all the deals from our sponsors. We’d love to hear what you thought of the show. Leave a comment in the show notes or email us at info@InDesignSecrets.com. Until we meet again, this is Anne-Marie Concepcion and…
David: David Blatner for InDesign Secrets. [music]