Now the final thing we want to do to customize our layout is in fact the keyboard shortcuts. Now all of the Adobe programs have many keyboard shortcuts and a lot of them do follow the same rule. So it's easy to transfer from one program to the other. But InDesign has a couple that just need tweaking to something different in my view, to make it a bit easier for you to work with.
If you come up to the Edit Menu, at the very, very bottom, you will see the Keyboard Shortcuts command. So, go ahead and select that and you will notice that we are currently using the Default set of shortcuts. Now just out of interest under there, you do have the ability to change all of your shortcuts so they more closely match the original PageMaker 7.0 or different versions of QuarkXpress.
So if you are just new and coming across to InDesign, this can be quite a handy way for you to start. But instead of using the Default set, we are going to go ahead and create our own by clicking on the New Set button and I am just going to call this the Workflow Training Set. Now I am making sure it's also based on the Default set, so we don't choose any of the others by mistake. Go ahead and click OK and now any changes we make to the shortcuts will only apply to this set only, the defaults can stay as they are.
Now what we need to do is, locate the items that need changing and those can be found up here, under the Product Area. So every menu that you have in InDesign is visible right here. We have the File, the Edit, the Help, everything that you are familiar with seeing at the top of this screen. What we want to do is go and choose the File menu and then underneath that you will see all of the commands that are available and we can go ahead and change a keyboard shortcut.
The one we are going to look at first is Place. Now if you select that, you can see down here that the current default shortcut is Command+D or Ctrl+D on the PC. Now if you have come from an Illustrator background, this is normally very confusing because Command+D is a default shortcut for Duplicate and personally I like to stick with that one.
So we are going to change this to something else and use Command+D for Duplicate instead. So what we will do is, select the shortcut that's currently there and click on the Remove button on the right hand side, come down to the New Shortcut option and let's hit Shift+Command+P or Shift+Ctrl+P on the PC and it will bring up a small warning at the bottom here 'Currently Assigned to Pages, Add Page'.
Now that's a default keyboard shortcut that's already inside of InDesign. If you were to hit that normally, you would add a page and not see a dialog box to tell you that a page has been added, let alone where it's been added. So for me, I think this is a good shortcut for us to change it to because then it removes it from this current command and I think that's a little bit of a safer way to work inside of InDesign.
So we have chosen the Shift+Command+P, go ahead and click Assign on the right hand side, that is now set, and leaves the Command+D shortcut free to apply to Duplicate. So if you come back up to the Product Area here, let's go and choose the Edit Menu, that's where the Duplicate command is stored and you can see it right there, it's current shortcut Option+Shift+Command+D, that's too many keys, that's why we are bringing it down.
So again, select that one, remove it, come down here to New Shortcut and just simply press Command+D or Ctrl+D on the PC. You can now see underneath, it safely says 'This is an unassigned shortcut'. So we have the freedom to use it. Click Assign and then when you are done, go ahead and click OK.
Now a couple of other keyboard shortcuts I just want to make you aware of, when it comes to Workspaces, if you hit the Tab key, that removes all of your palettes, including the Control Palette. Now it looks like we have left InDesign, but InDesign is still accessible here at the top and any documents we are working on would be visible. The Tab key simply removes and brings the palettes back.
That's a good shortcut but it also has a downside, in that everything disappears. It maybe that you want to hide all of the palettes around the outside but keep the Control Palette and the Tools Palette, very simply, instead of hitting Tab, hold down the Shift key and then hit Tab and everything else will disappear but those two that you want to keep.
Applying the same keyboard shortcut, we will bring them back, we have now got our Preferences, our Shortcuts and our Workspace saved. We are now ready to move on with the creation of our document.
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