From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Typing and editing text - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Typing and editing text

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- [Instructor] I know people who have put away Microsoft Word, and they use InDesign as their word processor, really. Well, that does seem a bit extreme to me. I mean, if you need an alternate word processor that works well with InDesign, you should probably be using Adobe's InCopy software. But that said, InDesign does let you type and edit text pretty efficiently. Let me show you how. I want to edit some text in the middle here, so I'll select this text frame, and I'll zoom in with command 2 on the Mac or control 2 on Windows. Now, I'd like to place my cursor inside that story, but instead of having to go all the way to the tool panel to get the type tool, I'm going to use a shortcut. I'm just going to double click with the selection tool. That tells InDesign to switch to the type tool and place the cursor into the frame. It is so helpful to be able to do that quickly. Now, if you want to select the frame again, you just press the escape key on your keyboard. That switches back to the selection tool. Okay, I'm going to double click again to place a cursor inside that frame. So I'm inside the text frame, and the cursor is flashing, and everyone knows that you can simply click and drag to select some text. And you probably know that you can double click to select a word, but in InDesign, you also have triple clicks and quadruple clicks. A triple click selects the entire line, not the sentence, but that one line from the left margin to the right. A quadruple click selects the entire paragraph. You have to be a little coordinated to do that. You go one, two, three, four. There we go, the whole paragraph. There are also some keyboard shortcuts that you should try to memorize when working with text. First command A or control A on Windows, that selects all the text in the story. There we go, all the text is selected. The opposite is with the shift key, command shift A or control shift A, that deselects everything. It even deselects the frame. That's a good one to remember whenever you need to deselect everything on the page. All right, here's a couple more shortcuts you should know. I'll click back inside the middle of this paragraph here, and then the home button on my keyboard goes to the beginning of the line, and the end button jumps to the end of the line. But what I use most often is adding the command or the control key. So command home on the Mac or control home on Windows jumps all the way to the beginning of the story, not just the paragraph, but the whole story. The opposite, of course, is command or control end, which takes me to the end of the story. I won't do that quite yet. Plus, if you add the shift key to any of these shortcuts, InDesign will select instead of just move. Like, if I click down here and then press command shift home or control shift home on Windows, well that selects from that position in the text all the way back to the beginning of the story. That shift key trick is really handy when you're trying to select text to format it. Now, editing text right on the document page is acceptable, but it's not always very efficient. In a later chapter, we're going to learn about the story editor feature, and that can make editing text so much simpler and it still takes advantage of all of these shortcuts.

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