I’m in the middle of a large production project in InDesign CS3, and as I’m working, I’m noticing how helpful certain new features are to my workflow; especially the numerous little improvements — tiny tweaks, extra checkboxes, new shortcuts — that may escape the attention of new CS3 users.
So in no particular order, here’s a short list of my favorite new CS3 “little things” that are helping me speed up production tremendously:
Double-click toggle. Just double-click on an image to toggle between the Selection and Direct Selection tools. I’m finding this handy not to actually switch tools, but as a way to quickly reveal the scaling percentage applied to an image. I just double-click on any scaled image — which switches my Selection tool to the Direct Selection one — then do one more click to select the image itself. After a quick look at the scale fields in the Control panel, I double-click again and I’m returned to my Selection tool.
Apply Style to Selection. This little checkbox at the bottom of every Styles panel lets me apply the new style I’ve just about finished creating to the locally-formatted text, object, table or cell I had selected as a source for the new style in the first place. After twenty years using layout programs, it’s a relief to have the program apply the new style to the source automatically!
Standalone cell styles. In this project I’m using a lot of single-row, multi-columned tables for figures and captions that are part of the text flow. Only a few of these lend themselves to Table styles (too much variation), but I’ve found just the cell styles on their own are great. I made different styles depending on the contents of the cell … ones with just an image, ones that are empty (to apply a background fill), ones with bold text (remember, Cell styles can automatically apply a given Paragraph style) and so on. Makes the formatting work go a lot faster.
Escape key toggle in tables. When you’re editing a cell, tapping the Escape key on your keyboard selects the cell. Tap it again, and the contents of the cell (but not the cell itself) is selected. As I edit a cell’s contents, I can quickly tap the Escape key to select the cell itself, then choose a Cell style from the panel or from Quick Apply.
Quick Apply does Menus. If you don’t want to bother creating a custom keyboard shortcut for a menu command (or can’t remember the shortcut), don’t forget you can always choose any command via Quick Apply. Press Command-Return on a Mac or Ctrl-Enter on Windows to open the little Quick Apply dialog box. Then type a word or two from the menu command and you’ll see it appear selected at the top, or very near the top of the dialog box. For example, if you type “remove,” the command that gets selected is “Remove Selected Local Overrides” which is normally a pain in the butt to get to, since it’s buried in the Pages panel menu. Press the Return/Enter key to apply the command to the selection.
There are a ton of the these little improvements in CS3. I’d love to hear which ones you’ve found to be particularly useful in your day-to-day work.
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on June 18, 2007
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