This tip was sent to Tip of the Week email subscribers on January 14, 2016.
Sign up now and every week you’ll get a new InDesign Tip of the Week and Keyboard Shortcut of the Week, along with roundups of new articles at InDesignSecrets, plus exclusive deals sent right to your Inbox!
Just scroll all the way down to the bottom of this page, enter your email address, and click Go! We’ll take care of the rest. Now, on with the tip!
Now that we’re two weeks into 2016, it’s safe to say that most of us have abandoned any New Year’s resolutions we made. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still make small changes to get things done faster/easier/better in InDesign. Here’s an idea: make 2016 the year you finally tidy up that Swatches panel. You know what I’m talking about. The one that looks like this:
One thing you can do to clean things up is to merge swatches that are very similar or may have been duplicated by mistake. First, deselect everything in the document. Then click the swatch you want to keep in the Swatches panel. Then Shift-click or Command/Ctrl-click to select the swatches you want to merge. Right-click on them and choose Merge Swatches (you can also choose this command from the panel menu).
That’s it. There is no dialog box or warning, the swatch you select first will replace the other swatches wherever they were used.
Other things you can do to give your Swatches panel a makeover:
- Choose Select All Unused from the panel menu and delete unnecessary swatches
- Use Justin Putney’s Sort Swatches script to arrange your swatches by name
- Create color groups for swatches that share a common theme or purpose
- Use a consistent naming convention for all your swatches
This article was last modified on July 25, 2019
This article was first published on January 19, 2016
Commenting is easier and faster when you're logged in!
