Show Options When Placing
When you place content into your layout, click the Show Import Options checkbox to intercept a file and perform certain functions, such as stripping formatting from a Word file. You can access the Import Options dialog by holding the Shift key when you click on the Place button in the Place dialog box
-- Mordy Golding, from InDesign Magazine #7, Aug/Sept 2005

Preview Image Moves
When moving a cropped image inside a frame, hold down the mouse button for about a second before you move the object. You'll get a ghosted preview of the whole image in the frame
-- Jamie McKee, from InDesign Magazine #7, Aug/Sept 2005

Type-size Shortcuts
To change type size and leading incrementally, start by setting increment size (Preferences > Units & Increments). In your document, use Shift-Command/Ctrl-< to decrease the point size of selected type by one increment, and Shift-Command/Ctrl-> to increase the point size. Add the Option/Alt key to these combinations to multiply the increment by five. You can change leading via Option/Alt-Up and Option/Alt-Down arrow key combinations. Add the Ctrl/Command key to these combinations to multiply the increment by five
-- Erica Gamet, from InDesign Magazine #7, Aug/Sept 2005

Copy Text Formatting
Do you need to copy text formatting from one location to another? To do it quickly, select the Eyedropper tool, click on text you want to sample, and then use the Eyedropper to click or drag over text you want to modify. This technique even copies text attributes from one document to another. To set which qualities the Eyedropper tool will copy, double-click the Eyedropper tool and enable or disable the individual attributes
-- Erica Gamet, from InDesign Magazine #7, Aug/Sept 2005

Reveal Custom Kerning
One person's idea of appropriate kerning can be a compacted visual disaster for another person. My limit for the loosest and tightest kern is 30 (thousandths of an em). That means if some copy is kerned into -20 I will never go over +10 elsewhere in the document.

To see where kerning has taken place outside of paragraph and character styles, go to Preferences > Composition, select the Custom Tracking/ Kerning option, and click OK. In normal view mode (not in preview mode), InDesign now highlights in green text with custom tracking and kerning.
-- Matt Davis, from InDesign Magazine #7, Aug/Sept 2005

Quickly Convert Corner Points to Curves
Everyone knows that you can use the Direct Selection tool (the white arrow) to select a point on any frame. But did you know that if you hold down the Command and Option keys (Ctrl and Alt on Windows) you can drag on any corner point to convert it to a Bezier curve? Alternately, you can click once with those modifier keys on a curve point to convert it to a corner point.

Split Stories
A frequently-requested feature by InDesign users is the ability to split a long text thread into multiple pieces so that each text frame retains the text that's in it, but that the frames are no longer linked. There is no built-in feature to do this, but Adobe does bundle a script that does it for you. It's called SplitStories and you can find it on your install discs. Or, go to http://www.adobe.com/products/indesign/xml_scripting.html and download the bundle of scripts from there.

Better Text Wrap
When you assign a text wrap to an imported graphic, be sure to first select the graphic with the Selection (black arrow) tool. This applies the text wrap to the frame, not the frame's contents, which makes it easier to delete the graphic or replace it with a new graphic without deleting the text wrap
-- Keith Gilbert, from InDesign Magazine #7, Aug/Sept 2005

Break Words
To manually break a word at the end of a line, use a discretionary hyphen. Put your cursor where you want to break the word, then choose Type > Insert Special Character > Discretionary Hyphen or Command/Ctrl-Shift-Hyphen. If type should reflow so the word is no longer at a line ending, the discretionary hyphen disappears. To hyphenate a word that never breaks on that hyphen, use a non-breaking hyphen: Type > Insert Special Character > Nonbreaking Hyphen. To prevent a word or string of text from breaking, select the text and choose No Break from the Character or Control palette menu
-- Erica Gamet, from InDesign Magazine #7, Aug/Sept 2005

Edit Text Frames
You can edit text frames just like graphics frames and transform them into almost any shape. Use the Selection or the Direct Selection tool to select the text box, and then use the Pen tool to add anchor points. You can manipulate these anchor points just as you would any vector path
-- John Feld, from InDesign Magazine #7, Aug/Sept 2005

Multi-column Text, One-Column Headline
Making one headline span several columns of text in a multi-column text frame takes some trickery. Here's one way to do it.

1. Use the Text tool to create a text frame.

2. In Text Frame Options, choose the desired number of columns.
3. Use the Type on a Path tool on the text frame outline and type the headline.
4. Position the text brackets so that the text begins and ends above the text frame.
5. Thread the text frames by selecting the headline out-port and connecting it to the text frame.
6. To vertically distance the headline from the body text, apply a baseline shift to the headline.

Why bother with all these steps? Because you can use Object Styles and Apply Next Style to format this type of frame and its content with one click. Also, both the headline and the body appear together in the Story Editor.
-- Rufus Deuchler, from InDesign Magazine #7, Aug/Sept 2005

Delete Preference Files
You can delete InDesign's preference files when launching InDesign. To display this option dialog, launch InDesign, then immediately select Ctrl+Alt+Shift (Windows) or Ctrl+Option+Command+Shift (Mac OS).
-- Eliot Harper, from InDesign Magazine #7, Aug/Sept 2005

Extending a Line
Need to add rows or columns to a table? Here's the fastest way to add rows at the end of a table or columns at the right hand side of a table:

1. Hover your Text tool cursor over the bottom or right edge of the table so that the cursor changes to a double arrow.

2. Now, press and hold down the mouse button -- but still don't move the mouse.
3. Press and hold down the Option/Alt key.
4. Now move the mouse down (for extra rows) or to the right (for extra columns). The more you drag, the more rows or columns InDesign adds.

The Environment Dialog Box
One of the most useful dialog boxes in InDesign is also one of the least seen: The Environment dialog box. You can find this little creature by holding down the Command/Ctrl key and choosing About InDesign (from the Help menu on Windows, or the application menu on the Mac). The Environment dialog box tells you all about your version of InDesign, including what plug-ins are running. More importantly, it tells you about the current document, such as: Was it originally a QuarkXPress or PageMaker file? When was it last saved? And what special plug-ins were used to create it?

Jump from One Master
Do you have lots of master pages in your document? Need to jump from one to the next? It's a hassle to double-click on each of them in the Pages palette. Don't bother: Just use the Next Spread or Previous Spread features from the Layout menu. Better yet, just use the shortcuts: hold down Option/Alt and press Page Up or Page Down. When you're viewing any master page, this shortcut takes you to the next (or previous) one.

Build Guide Libraries
You can save a page's guides by selecting them and choosing Add Item from the Library's palette menu or by clicking the New Item button at the bottom of the palette. Then, when you want to use the same set of guides on another page, simply select it in the Library and choose Place Item(s) in the palette menu. This places the same guides, in the same positions, on the new page. You can't add to or place guides from a Library using drag and drop.
-- Erica Gamet, InDesign Magazine #7, Aug/Sept 2005

Stroke Frame and Table Corners
Here's how to make a stroke that appears only at the corners of a frame:

1. Create a new dashed stroke style by choosing Stroke Styles from the Stroke palette menu. Call it something like Corners.

2. Apply the stroke to a text or graphic frame and give it an adequate stroke width.
3. Return to the stroke style to edit Corners.
4. For Pattern Length, insert a value that's much larger than your frame.
5. For Corners, choose Adjust Gaps (which will keep the length of the dash fixed).
6. Choose Preview for real time fine-tuning.
7. Move the little ruler arrow until you achieve the desired result (or enter a value for Length).

You can then apply that stroke to any frame (of any size) and the corners will be identical for all objects. For surprising effects, try it on tables, too.
-- Rufus Deuchler, InDesign Magazine #7, Aug/Sept 2005

Look Back at History
If you hold down the Command/Ctrl key while you choose About InDesign from the InDesign menu (Mac) or Help menu (Win), you'll see the Component Information dialog box. It tells you exactly what version of InDesign you're running and which plug-ins are installed. The Document History section of the dialog tells you when the document was first created and by what version of InDesign, when it was last saved, whether the file was ever converted from Quark or PageMaker, and other information. All of it may be useful for diagnosing a troublesome document.
-- Keith Gilbert, InDesign Magazine #7, Aug/Sept 2005

Quick Switch for Measurements
You know you can type any measurement into any number field. (For example, even if your measurement preferences is set to inches, you can type "3p" into the X field to position an object at three picas.) But sometimes it's helpful to actually change InDesign's rulers. You can change the ruler measurement system in the Preferences dialog box, but here's an even faster method: Press Command-Option-Shift-U/Ctrl-Alt-Shift-U. Each time you press this shortcut, InDesign rotates through to the next measurement system (millimeters to centimeters to ciceros, and so on). One more technique you should know about: You can right-click on a ruler (or Control-click with a one-button mouse) to set the measurement system for that one ruler.

Recompose All Stories
Sometimes you need to re-compose all your stories in your InDesign document. This could be because you changed your hyphenation method, because you switched languages, or for a handful of other reasons. Or perhaps you simply want to make double-sure that all of your stories are composed with the very current settings. But how to do that?

One way is to turn on the checkbox "Recompose all stories when User Dictionary is modified" in the Dictionary panel of the Prefences dialog box. Now make any change in the user dictionary, save this change, wait until the stories have been re-composed, and finally revert the change in the User Dictionary.

A much faster method is to choose Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts, choose the product area "Text and Tables," scroll down the list to the entry "Recompose all Stories immediately" and assign a keyboard shortcut to it. Save your change, and then just type your new keyboard shortcut! --Courtesy of Rudi Warttmann, ITIP.biz

Place a Guide with a Click (or Two)
You can place a guide on your page by double-clicking at the appropriate position on the horizontal or vertical ruler. (If you can't see the rulers around the page, choose View > Show Rulers, or press Command/Ctrl-R.) Even better, hold down the Shift key when you place the guide and it will be placed at the location of the nearest ruler tick mark. That is, you don't have to click exactly on the 100mm tick mark to get a guide there; just get near that tick mark and Shift-double-click.

Switch to the Next Window
I almost always work with several InDesign document windows open at the same time and I often need to swtich from one window to the next. Sure, I could use the Window menu to do this, but it's often much faster to press Command/Ctrl-tilde to switch to the next window Command-Shift/Ctrl-Shift-tilde to switch to the previous window. The tilde key is in the upper-left corner of the keyboard on US keyboards.

If you have a non-US keyboard, the keyboard shortcut might be different. You can customize it to whatever you want by choosing Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts, picking "Views, Navigation" from the Product Area popup menu, and finding the Next Window and Previous Window commands.

Jump to the End of the Story
One of the best ways to get efficient in InDesign is to learn the keyboard shortcuts for navigating around text. For example, you probably know that Command/Ctrl-Down Arrow moves to the beginning of the next paragraph. Here's a few that I find many people don't take advantage of:

• Command/Ctrl-End jumps to the end of the current text story

• Command-Shift/Ctrl-Shift-End selects from the current text cursor position to the end of the story, even if the end of the story is overset (past the end of the last text frame).
• Replace the Home key above to jump or select to the beginning of the story.
• Note that on some keyboards, you may have to add another modifier key. For example, on my PowerBook I have to add the "Fn" key before pressing the right-arrow key to select to the end of the story (because Fn-Right Arrow equals the End key on my keyboard).

Thread Backwards
Just about everyone knows that you can click on the out-port of a text object to click on or draw another text frame that creates or continues a text thread. But you can also click on the in-port of a text frame-even if it's the first frame in the thread-to start the thread in a different frame. This is especially useful when you place a story, then realize you want the headline in its own frame so you can give it a drop shadow.
-- Mordy Golding, from InDesign Magazine #7, Aug/Sept 2005

Linking Multiple Text Frames
You can easily link three or more text frames using the Option/Alt key. To link existing text frames, click in the overflow box of the first frame, then Option/Alt-click in each subsequent text frame. To create and link text frames on-the-fly, create the first frame, click in its overflow box, then Option-click and drag to create each subsequent frame.
-- Erica Gamet, from InDesign Magazine #7, Aug/Sept 2005

Lock Objects when Aligning or Centering
If you select two objects on your page that aren't overlapping and use the Align or Control palette to center them, both objects will move. That can be very annoying if you wanted one of them to stay put. Similarly, if you align two objects horizontally, the left-most object always stays in position and the other one moves. Fortunately, you can tell InDesign that an object should not move by selecting it and choosing Object > Lock Position (Command/Ctrl-L). If an object is locked when you use the Align features, then all the objects align to it.

Speedy One-Word Spell Check
InDesign CS2's new Dynamic Spelling feature -- it flags misspelled words as you type-is useful and convenient for on-the-fly corrections, but it can be distracting, especially when you're trying to concentrate on something other than spelling. For the best of both worlds, assign a keyboard shortcut to Dynamic Spelling with Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts. Keep the feature turned off (it's off by default), but when you're curious if a certain word is spelled correctly, use the keyboard shortcut to briefly toggle it on. If the word is misspelled, it'll sprout a (non-printing) red underline. Right-click on the word to choose the correct spelling or add it to the dictionary from the contextual menu. If the word is spelled correctly, nothing changes -- no underline appears. Press the shortcut again to toggle Dynamic Spelling off and continue with your work.
-- Anne-Marie Concepción, from InDesign Magazine #7, Aug/Sept 2005

Fast Word Replacement
Create your own shorthand dictionary for words you type all the time (or that tend to slow you down) by using InDesign CS2's new Autocorrect feature. The secret is to create a string of text that would not otherwise occur; this is a placeholder for your desired text. For instance, if you routinely butcher the capitalization of the word "InDesign," set up the text "qq" to stand in for "InDesign" by opening the Autocorrect pane in Preferences, choosing Add, and entering the Misspelled Word (qq) and the Correction (InDesign). Now when you type the word "qq," Autocorrect swaps the correct text for the placeholder. Autocorrect ignores the string of text if it occurs within a word.
--Erica Game, from InDesign Magazine #7, Aug/Sept 2005

Quick Tints of Colors
Need a color a little lighter or darker than the one you've got? When you edit or create a new color (in the Colors palette or the New Color Swatch dialog box), you can hold down the Shift key while dragging the sliders to make all the others sliders move, too. The result is a more or less saturated version of the color you started with.

What's That Override?
To see local overrides in InDesign CS2, hold the mouse over the plus sign of the name of a paragraph or character style name in the Paragraph Styles and Character Styles palettes.
-- Jamie McKee, from InDesign Magazine #7, Aug/Sept 2005

No More Rasterized Text
Drop shadows and other transparency can be very effective, but not when small text such as a caption rasterizes in the flattening process at print time. For worry-free designs, create at least two layers in your document: One at the top level for all of your text, and one at the bottom level for all of your images. Text that appears above a transparency effect in the stacking order will never rasterize.
-- Mordy Golding, from InDesign Magazine #7, Aug/Sept 2005

Removing a Frame from a Thread, Part 2
I previously suggested a method for removing a text frame from a story. Several people wrote to ask me why I shouldn't just delete the frame itself. Sure, that works, but the hard part is keeping the frame on the page and just making the story skip past it. Then tip-of-the-week reader Arsim Shala from Kosovo wrote me with a great solution: Select the frame you want removed, cut it to the clipboard (Command/Ctrl-X), and then paste it back in the same place (Command-Option-Shift-V/Ctrl-Alt-Shift-V). Now, if you want the frame to be empty, double-click on it to place the Text cursor in the frame, press Command-A/Ctrl-A to select all the text, and press Delete. This is one of those tips that is much faster to do than to explain in writing.

Thanks for the tip, Arsim! In appreciation, we're going to give you a free 2-issue subscription to InDesign Magazine! (You can pick any two past issues, or be signed up to get the next two issues free.)

Typing a Tab in a Table
Need to place a tab character inside a table cell? You can choose Type > Insert Special Character > Tab. Or, even easier, on the Macintosh, just press Option-Tab. If you do this a lot on Windows, you should apply a keyboard shortcut to the Tab character by:
1. Choose Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts
2. If you haven't already created a custom shortcut set, click New Set
3. Choose Type Menu from the Product Area popup menu
4. Choose Insert Special Character: Tab from the Commands list.
5. Choose Tables from the Context popup menu.
6. Type a keyboard shortcut (such as Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Tab) in the New Shortcut field.
7. Click Assign and then click OK.

Remove A Frame From a Thread
You've linked four text frames (lets call them A, B, C, and D) but now you realized that frame B was supposed to be some other text story, so you want to take it out of the thread. Can you do it? First, unlink text frame A from the thread by double-clicking on its out port with the Selection tool. Next, select text frame B and unlink it from the thread by double-cliking on its out port. Finally, select frame A and link it to frame C (by clicking frame A's out port and then clicking anywhere on top of frame C). This works because when you unlink text frame A, InDesign preserves the thread from frame B to C, to D.

Custom Placeholder Text
When you need to fill a text frame (or a bunch of linked text frames) with "dummy" text, place the text cursor in the frame and choose Type > Fill with Placeholder Text. InDesign applies the current text formatting (the style of the text where the cursor was placed) to all the text it adds. By default, the text is quasi-Latin based on the Lorem Ipsum text that designers have been using for decades. However, if the Caps Lock key is held down, InDesign uses random words from an oration by Cicero. Don't like that either? Save any text file (ASCII txt file only) in the InDesign application folder with the name placeholder.txt and InDesign will use that text instead!

Centering Objects on the Page, Part 2
Last week's tip focused on aligning objects to the page (rather than other objects on the page). I received a number of emails pointing out that InDesign Magazine already published another solution to centering an object on a page:

1. Select the object(s) and cut them to the clipboard (Command/Ctrl-X).
2. Press Command/Ctrl-0 (zero) to go to Fit in Window view.
3. Paste (Command/Ctlr-V)

I like this method of centering objects, but it is not always entirely precise. Sometimes (depending on the actual percentage view when you are in Fit in Window), the object appears slightly off center -- though usually only a tiny distance from the center.

For other cool methods of centering and aligning objects on your page, see the article in an upcoming issue of InDesign Magazine!

Center an Object on the Page
InDesign offers all kinds of cool features, but some of the basic features it lacks can leave you scratching your head. For example, the Align palette and the Control palette make it easy to align two or more objects along their edges or centers. But how do you align one or more objects to the page itself? The trick is to create an object that is the same size as the page itself. I typically press F (for the Frame tool), draw out a small frame, press Command/Ctrl-6 to jump to the Control palette, type zero-tab-zero-tab-W-tab-H-enter (where H and W are the width and height of the page). Now select that object along with the ones you want to align and use the aforementioned palettes to align them. Store the big object as a snippet in Bridge, a Library, or your desktop for use later, and then (optionally) delete it from the page.

Duplicating a Page
Need to make a slight variation on a layout but keep the original? You can duplicate a page in your document by holding down the Option/Alt key while dragging it in the Pages palette.

Moving Objects Behind Other Objects
You know that you can select one object behind another one by Command/Ctrl-clicking, right? Just keep clicking with Command/Ctrl key held down until you select the one you want. But now how do you move that object? You could use the Control palette to adjust its X and Y coordinates. Or, even cooler: Just drag the centerpoint of that object. If you drag anywhere other than the centerpoint, you move the topmost object. But the centerpoint moves the object itself.

Go and Fit in Window
You know you can jump to a particular page by double-clicking on it in the Pages palette. But did you know that you can hold down the Option/Alt key while double-clicking to jump to that page and switch to Fit Page in Window at the same time?

Copying Color Swatches
Michael Brady pointed out a clever way to copy color swatches from one document to another in InDesign CS2: Just select them in the first document (Command/Ctrl-click to select swatches that aren't next to each other) and then drag them from the palette to the second document (the one you want to add them to). Simple, easy, fast. I wish we could do that with paragraph styles and object styles, too!

Target That Page
If you drag the vertical scroll bar halfway down, you'll end up about halfway through your long InDesign document. But if you follow that by pressing Shift-Page Down (to jump to the next page), you may end up on a very unexpected page. Why? Because this keyboard shortcut takes you to the next page after the currently-targeted page in the Pages palette, not the one you're actually looking at. So after dragging the scroll bar, click once anywhere on the page or pasteboard. That targets this spread. Now the shortcut will work as expected.

Linking Two Full Frames
Unlike QuarkXPress, InDesign can link two text frames when both frames contain text. When you do this, the stories in the text frames are merged into a single story. If the text in the first text frame did not end with a carriage return, InDesign will run the text in the second frame into the last paragraph of the first text frame.

Follow-up on Search and Replace Quote Marks
One of my favorite things about tips & tricks is that they are sometimes so obvious, and yet I learn new ones all the time. Here is a great example.

In response to last week's tip about converting straight quotes to curly ("typographer's") quotes, Martin Braun wrote to us from Germany:

"I think there is an even faster way to set all quotation marks to typographer's style: Just replace all quotation marks by another character or combination of characters that is not included in the text (e.g. "###"). Then replace "###" with " (the quotation mark). InDesign will automatically use the correct quotation mark." (Note that this only works when the Use Typographer's Quotes checkbox is turned on in the Preferences dialog box.)

Thanks, Martin!

Search and Replace Quote Marks
I was recently sent a file that had straight quotation marks (both single and double) instead of curly (typographer's) quotes. It turns out that it's harder to replace these than it should be. Here are two methods, each with their pros and cons.

• Method 1: Find/Change
  It's easy to search for quotes: Just type a single or double quote mark in the Find What field of the Find/Change dialog box. But how do you convert a straight single quote to a curly quote? There is a keyboard shortcut (different on Mac OS and Windows) to type curly quotes, but why bother trying to remember it? Just pick a special character from the little flyout menu to the right of the Change To field (it's the one labeled with a small black triangle).

  Unfortunately, you have to pick either the left or the right quote -- so you should probably search for a space character followed by a quote first. That will find most of the beginning quotes (because there is usually a space before an open quote mark). Replace that with a space followed by the Single or Double Left Quotation Mark (from that flyout menu). Next search for all the paragraph characters (again, from that menu) followed by a quote mark. That'll find all the quote marks at the beginning of a sentence. The quote marks that are left over are probably close marks, so you can search for all the rest of the quote marks and change them to the Single or Double Right Quotation Mark.

• Method 2: Export/Import
  Here's a far faster way to accomplish the same thing. (Thanks to Anne-Marie Concepcion for the clue to this solution.) Place the flashing text cursor in the story and choose File > Export. Then choose InDesign Tagged Text from the Format popup menu and click Save (noting where you're saving the file, of course). Now select the whole text story in your document, delete it, choose File > Place, and select the file you just saved out. Before you click OK, turn on Show Import Options. Now, when you click OK, InDesign offers you the option of replacing your quotes with typographer quotes. Turn it on, click OK, and you're done.

The first solution takes longer, but is great when you have a bunch of different text stories in your document (or you want to search across multiple open documents). The second solution is faster, but only works one story at a time.

Save All Open Documents
I have 15 InDesign files open, and I've just performed a Find/Change across them all. (Did you know you can do that? Just choose All Documents in the Find/Change dialog box.) Now I want to save them all. It's a hassle to switch to each window and choose File > Save. Avery Raskin to the recue! He recently pointed out to me the hidden keyboard shortcut for Save All: Command-Option-Shift-S (or Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S). That just saved me a bunch of time. That's what I like about InDesign: You learn something new everyday.

Hide and Seek Side Palettes
To expand or contract all the side palettes (the palettes that are stashed along the left or right side of the monitor), press Command-Option-Tab, or Ctrl-Alt-Tab. Alternately, you can Option/Alt-click on one of the palette tabs to expand or contract all the side palettes on that side of the screen.

Clear Overrides in a Paragraph
You've got a paragraph with a paragraph style applied, but part of the paragraph has local overrides (like font, size, color, or whatever) that you want to get rid of. If you select some text (such as a word or two) and click the Remove Overrides button in the Paragraph Styles palette, InDesign removes any local formatting applied to that text. But if you place the cursor in the paragraph and don't actually select any text before clicking this button, InDesign removes the local formatting from the entire paragraph.

Get Those Points
You've applied a Corner Effect to a frame, but now you want to edit the path slightly with the Direct Selection tool. Unfortunately, the Corner Effects don't actually place editable points on your frame; they just simulate the rounded corners or inverse corners (or whatever effect you've applied). The Pathfinder palette to the rescue! In CS2, simply open the Pathfinder palette (Window > Object & Layout > Pathfinder), select the frame, and click the Open Path or the Close Path button. The corner effects suddenly get converted to real Bezier points!

Manage Your Palettes Better
Let's face it: InDesign has a LOT of palettes, and a huge amount of time each day is spent just opening the right set of palettes, positioning them, closing other palettes, and so on. Make life easier for yourself by creating workspaces. Workspaces remember which palettes are opened (or closed) and where they're located on the screen. To make a workspace, set up the screen just the way you want it and then choose Window > Workspace > Save Workspace. InDesign then lets you name your workspace whatever you want. Later, when your palettes are all mixed up again, you can choose that workspace from the same Workspace submenu. Make one workspace for editing text, one for laying out pages, one for proofing, and so on.

Aligning Decimals in a Table
How on Earth are you going to align the decimal points in that column of numbers in your table? No problem. Just select the whole column (choose the Type tool and click over the top of the column when you see the bold down-arrow cursor), open the Tabs palette (Window > Tabs), select the Decimal Tab Stop in the palette, and click in the palette's ruler where you want the decimals to be aligned. The cool thing is that this works without you typing a tab character into each cell!

Go Back to the Previous Page
Two of my favorite underused features in InDesign are the Go Back and Go Forward commands (hiding under the Layout menu, even though they should be under the View menu). Let's say you're in the middle of your document and you decide to jump to a master page. Now, you want to return to the page you were last on. Choose Go Back! (Faster, press Command/Ctrl-Page Up). It's like navigating back through pages you've seen in a Web browser. Then you can choose Go Forward (Command/Ctrl-Page Down) to navigate forward again.