David Blatner’s InDesign CS3 Essentials on Lynda.com

Anne-Marie Concepcion

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I suspect that David is reluctant to self-promote himself in this way, so I’ll have to step up to the plate.

If you really want to get up to speed with InDesign – new user or seasoned pro – check out David’s new video tutorial series on Lynda.com, “InDesign CS3 Essential Training.” It just went live on their site yesterday, surprising both of us! (We thought they’d send us an e-mail or something.)

InDesign CS3 Essential Training is nine-plus hours of primo video tutorial content. The Quicktime videos average four or five minutes each and are organized into chapters: Workspace, Creating a Document, Text, Graphics, Working with Tables, Color, Exporting, and so on.

If you follow the Lynda.com links I’m including in this post, you’ll get a week’s free trial of the entire Lynda.com library courtesy of InDesignSecrets. Use the site’s Product or Author drop-down menus to get to the ID CS3 Essentials videos.

Almost all the Adobe CS3 video tutorial titles (Photoshop CS3 Essentials, Illustrator CS3 Essentials, etc.) are now live on the site as well, so there’s plenty to watch. After the week’s free trial, you’re limited to a few sample videos for each title, but membership is as little as $25 for full access for a month. (You’ll need to pay for a year upfront if you want access to the sample files used by the presenters.)

I watched one of his videos yesterday – the one on working with Excel and Word tables – and learned something new. After you’ve placed and styled a table from an Excel spreadsheet, you can go back to Excel, drag-select and copy the data (which might contain new numbers), go back to InDesign, and replace the table’s existing data without losing formatting by just selecting the first cell in the InDesign table and choosing Paste! ID automatically figures out which rows and columns should get updated data from what it reads in the clipboard.