Adobe InDesign CS2 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques

#6. Managing Palettes

Like an artist's paint palette, the palettes in InDesign put all the artistic tools you need at your fingertips. However, InDesign offers much more than a Colors palette, resulting in literally scores of palettes that can clutter your screen. If you have a second monitor, you can relocate them there, leaving them open and ready to use. But if you don't have that luxury, particularly if you're working on a laptop or you're using a small monitor, you'll need to control which palettes are open and their position onscreen.

Fortunately, the palettes and the configuration of palettes onscreen are easy to customize. You can even save palette configurations as workspaces.

Palette Basics

To help with palette management, many palettes are combined into tabbed palette groups. When palettes are combined into a group, they are said to be docked. In addition, palettes can be collapsed into a vertical bar on the right side of the screen. The palette configuration is flexible, so you can easily open and manage the palettes you use the most.

  • To open a palette, choose its name from the Window menu. A quick look at the Window menu gives you an idea of the power in InDesign's palettes: Pages, Colors, Text Wrap, Tables, Layers, and much more.

  • To close a palette, click its close box or choose its name from the Window menu again.

  • To display a palette within a tabbed group, click its tab.

  • To create a single palette from a palette in a group, drag its tab out of the group (Figure 6a).

    Figure 6a. Drag a palette's tab out of the group to create an individual palette for it.

  • To reconfigure a palette group, drag a tab into a different palette group.

  • To resize a palette, drag the lower-right corner.

Note that some palettes have keyboard shortcutsdisplayed in the Window menuthat open and close them. If you find yourself opening and closing the same palettes, memorize that palette's keyboard shortcut or create one for it (for more information, see #3).

Collapsing Palettes

Some palettes are collapsed into a vertical bar on the right side of the screen. Click the gray bar to display those palettes (Figure 6b). As with other palette groups, you can drag the tabs into their own palettes or into other palette groups. To collapse the palettes again, click the gray bar again.

Figure 6b. Click the gray bar at left to collapse palettes into a vertical bar on the right side of the InDesign application window.

Saving a Palette Configuration

Each time you quit InDesign, your current palette configuration is savedincluding which palettes are open, their size, how they are grouped, and their locations. The palettes will open in this same way the next time you launch InDesign. If you use certain palette configurations for specific projects, you can save the configuration as a workspace. To do this, set up the palettes the way you want, and then choose Window > Workspace > Save Workspace. Enter a name that indicates the purpose of the configurationfor example, Text Editing or Production. You can then choose that configuration from the Window > Workspace submenu anytime you need those palettes.

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