InDesign

I attended an InDesign seminar today. It was put on by NAPP and taught by Taz Tally. It was very well done. I was thinking about the favorite things I learned today and in keeping with my previous post of the little (but important) things, I'll post a couple little things which make a big difference.

• In the Preferences>Type, you can set a preference for text to be linked with Create Links When Placing Text and Spreadsheet Files. For someone who has written programming books, I can tell you this is huge.


• Again in Preferences>Type, the Text Only setting when pasting text.


• Using the Story Editor to view and edit just the text in a text box. It even shows you which text is overflowing. What a nice feature to be able to focus on the text when you need to.


• Under Windows>Output select the Separations Preview. Very cool.


• Under New Paragraph Styles>Drop Caps and Nested Styles check out the Nested Styles.


• The Table>Convert Text to Table... feature. Just select some delimited text and apply it and you have a table.

It was a great seminar at a very reasonable price ($79 for NAPP members). I was surprised at the number of people that showed up (450-500). The workbook was followed pretty closely, so it will be a useful reference/reminder for what was covered.

When I was an instructor at Sun, I suggested more than once that the 5-day classes were too expensive and too much of a time time commitment for a majority of potential students. Given the enormous turnout for this seminar, I think my feelings are justified. Not only was it only one day, but it had no labs. He just delivered the information (no questions during the lecture either). That lecture only could have been a negative but it was very efficient and I think made effective by the high quality of the workbook. I've been review the book and my notes this evening and trying out some of the material demonstrated. I plan to attend the next seminar NAPP puts on in Denver.