Style Groups, introduced in InDesign CS3, are sometimes used to keep Styles panels organized. But a client showed me another clever use for style groups recently.
Imagine that you have three proposal designs, and you want a quick and easy way to switch a proposal between designs. Each proposal is built on the same template and paragraph style names are consistent throughout. Only the appearance of the Paragraph styles vary between the three designs.
I’d normally switch from one design to the next by loading Paragraph styles from one InDesign file into another. But what this client did was interesting. They created just one template, with three Style groups in the Paragraph Styles panel. Each style group had styles with exactly the same names, but with different appearances. Then, any time they want to change the appearance of a file they drag the paragraph styles from one group to another to change the look.
There are a couple of subtle moves needed to make this work easily. I’ve created a step-by-step example below:
1. Create Paragraph Styles, and apply them to your text.
2. Select the Paragraph Styles you created and chose New Group from Styles from the Paragraph Styles panel menu or the context menu, and name this group “In Use”.
3. Duplicate the “In Use” group two times, and name the two new groups “Plain” and “Fancy”. To easily duplicate a Style Group, just option/alt-drag the Style Group to an empty area in the Paragraph Styles panel.
4. In the “Fancy” Style Group, edit each of the Paragraph Styles so they look different than the styles in the “Plain” group. (In the screen shot below, I’ve edited the “Fancy” Paragraph styles, but they aren’t yet applied to anything).
Now, to quickly change all the text in the document from the “Plain” styles to the “Fancy” styles, do the following:
1. Duplicate the “Fancy” Paragraph Style Group by option/alt dragging it to an empty area of the Paragraph Styles panel. This will create a Style Group named “Fancy copy”.
2. Open up the “Fancy copy” Paragraph Style Group, select each of the styles within the group (click on the top style then shift-click on the bottom style), and then drag the Paragraph Styles onto the “In Use” Paragraph Style Group. A warning will appear asking if you want to overwrite the styles in the “In Use” Paragraph Styles Group. Click on the Overwrite button.
3. All the text in the document that is assigned one of the Paragraph Styles created in Step 1 should now display using the “Fancy” Paragraph Styles.
4. Select the empty “Fancy copy” Paragraph Styles Group and drag it to the trash can icon at the bottom of the Paragraph Styles panel. Click Yes when you see the Alert asking if you want to delete the style group “Fancy copy”.
This same technique should work with other types of styles also, such as Character Styles and Object Styles.
This article was last modified on December 20, 2021
This article was first published on April 5, 2010
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