Tip of the Week: Customizing the Control Panel

Mike Rankin

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InDesign’s Control panel puts many of the most important controls for positioning and formatting objects and text right in front of your eyeballs. But did you know you can customize it to suit your needs even better? To do so, click the menu at the far right side of the Control panel.

First, you can decide where the Control panel is positioned: docked at the top of the window, at the bottom, or floating by itself.

Then, at the bottom of the Control panel menu you can choose Customize to decide which items appear in the Control panel. There are six categories of controls.

You can show/hide all items in a category by clicking the box next to the category name. Or tip open the category by clicking the small triangle, and select individual items to show/hide.

Hiding items makes room for other ones when your screen is too narrow to fit everything at once. For example, if I’m working on a small laptop, there’s not enough room for my object styles to appear in the Control panel when I have a frame selected.

But if I use the customization options to turn off some items that I don’t need at my fingertips, I can make room for object styles.