Optimizing Your Workspace
This article appeared in Issue 136 of InDesign Magazine.Bill Carberry shows how to make the most of your screen real estate by building the best custom workspaces for your projects.
A workspace is the arrangement of your panels, such as Properties, Paragraph Styles, and Character Styles, that you can save and switch between using the Workspace Switcher at the top-right corner of the screen.
For example, you can switch from the default Essentials workspace (which does not contain the Control panel) to Essentials Classic (which does), or choose other workspaces such as Advanced, Book, and Digital Publishing. But the best part is that you can create and customize your own workspaces that reflect how you work, and which panels you need most often.
After all, panels that may seem obscure to one person could be mission critical to others who use them daily. For example, someone working with magazines for print production may not need panels for animations, buttons, and form fields that someone creating interactive documents might use throughout the day. So, which ones do you need? Many people prefer to arrange their most used panels in priority order, like a Top 10 list.
In this article, we’ll explore how to improve your productivity by building custom workspaces, as well as investigate some important user interface details you should understand if you want to be an InDesign power user.
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This is a great article on customizing the InDesign workspace!
However I cannot stress enough, especially if you’re on a very small screen, the time- and screen-saving benefits of learning Keyboard Shortcuts.
It’s all well and good to have an organized display setup, but knowing how to summon and dismiss those same panels is a life-saver on small screens. Learning the default setup, and even knowing how to customize your own setup, will literally save you countless hours of production time.
Here’s a handy-dandy URL for this site’s articles on a myriad of Shortcuts: https://indesignsecrets.com/?s=shortcuts
Is it possible to get a pdf of this article?
Betsy, if you become a Premium Subscriber to InDesignSecrets.com, you’ll get all the articles (including back issues) in PDF format. Or you can buy single issues here:
https://indesignsecrets.com/shop