You probably know about Preview mode in InDesign: Press W and suddenly the pasteboard goes neutral gray and all non-printing objects (guides, stuff hanging off the edge of the page) disappear. You can also get to Preview mode from the View > Screen Mode menu. But there’s another feature lurking in that menu, too: Presentation mode.
I love Presentation mode because it takes over your entire screen. It’s like Preview on steroids. The menus go away, the panels go away, all other programs disappear, everything of non-importance goes away, and you’re left with your page on a black background. It’s a terrific way to show a document to your boss or a client.
To jump into Presentation mode, you can also press Shift+W (obviously not when your cursor is in a text frame). To exit Presentation mode, you press the same shortcut or press the Esc key.
Here are a few other Presentation mode secrets you should know:
- When you’re in Presentation mode, you can press W to change the background to white, or G to set it to gray. Press B to set it back to Black.
- If you have more than one monitor, the document goes into Presentation mode on whatever monitor the document is currently on. (That might be different from where your InDesign menus and panels are.)
- You cannot work on your document in Presentation mode, but you can navigate through the document one spread at a time by pressing the arrow keys on your keyboard. Also, clicking with the mouse moves forward one spread, and Shift-clicking moves back.
- Even though InDesign calls this “Presentation mode”, unfortunately none of the interactive features work in this mode: no buttons, movies, animations, or anything like that. Too bad!
- Some people like to change their keyboard shortcuts, but if you change or add a keyboard shortcut to Presentation mode, be aware:
- You can find this shortcut by choosing Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts, choosing the Product Area called View Menu, and scrolling down the list until you find Screen Mode: Presentation.
- If you want the same shortcut to both enter and exit Presentation mode (as a toggle), you need to make two shortcuts for the same feature. First, set the Context (found at the bottom of the menu) to Default and assign your shortcut to this feature. Then, set the Context to Presentation mode and assign the same shortcut. Otherwise, you will be able to enter Presentation Mode, but you won’t be able to exit it again with that shortcut.
This article was last modified on January 30, 2023
This article was first published on August 15, 2013
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