(Let’s not worry about the Facebook 20% text rule in this case, clients always want a price in there). Each post contains a photo of a unique product and the price. Picture this: you have to build over 15 Facebook posts for your client. Data Merging or Indesign cheats that really do things for you So follow along this tutorial and try it yourself.įour. Now, a word of warning: this takes practice and in the beginning you run the risk of frustrating yourself if you don’t plan ahead. This is not really a “tool” but a range of settings that enable you to change the page size and shift all the elements around automatically. Say hello to InDesign’s “Liquid Page” rule.
How can we save time doing this you wonder? In the old days you would create a new document or new art-board every single time and either copy and paste the elements and shift them around to fit. So you’ve created a Facebook post that is 1080px by 1080px (a square) and you need to resize it for the following: Facebook cover (851px by 315px, a rectangle) and website carousel images ranging from 1200px wide to mobile sizes of 800px wide. InDesign cheats by making the page work for you and not against you You can find out more about using Style’s and Find/Change formats here. This is a big help when dealing with large amounts of text on multiple pages. Additionally changing the format of all instances of the text “ Bold” text to “ Italics” and viceversa is simple. You can search for a headline style, for example, and change it to a body text style format across the whole document. This can help you standardise your styles and make sure you haven’t missed any in the document. Searching by GREP is powerful but the basic search command can also help you find parts of your document with different character and paragraph styles. Also if you’d like to find out more about GREP check this vid below: However you can find most of the more common ones here.
GREP requires knowing the correct code to fire the correct search. This would have taken a considerable amount of time to find every instance and change it manually. This can be a pain, so we use InDesign’s “Search using GREP” tab to find all the instances of negative numbers and convert them to brackets. However when imported into InDesign some apps, like Excel, convert those (numbers) to “-” negative numbers. Accountants use “()” to denote a negative number. All the numbers are either positive numbers or negative numbers.
Let’s say, I have a table of numbers in a financial report. Now if that sounds a little strange, please bear with me, let me explain using a real world example. Basically, GREP finds patterns of text in InDesign and lets you manipulate it automatically. GREP sounds scary if you’re not a coder, however when you learn to use it, the results can be amazing. GREP stands for globally search a regular expression and print. or how I used Indesign cheats like this to stay sane If you would like to learn more about the basics of InDesign you can go here. These are advanced techniques and I don’t recommend trying these things if you’re just starting out. InDesign’s ability to automate tasks makes it stand out.
InDesign’s strength lies in multiple page documents, but I use it for almost everything. Adobe InDesign should do the heavy lifting for you and not the other way around. If you are a designer you just want time to design. Sometimes you have to use Adobe InDesign cheats to get your work done faster.