From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Adding automatic bullets and numbers - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Adding automatic bullets and numbers

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- [Instructor] You use a computer so that it will do the boring, mundane work for you, right? So next time you need to add a bunch of bullets or numbers in front of a list of paragraphs, don't type them manually. It's far more efficient to let InDesign add them for you. I have my long document file open, and let's press option or alt + page down to jump to the next spread. Now let's double click to switch to the type tool and select some of this text. I'll press command or control + plus a few times just to zoom in so we can see this better. Now up here in the control panel, I want to make sure that I'm using paragraph formatting, not character formatting, and then to add my bullets, I'll just come over here and click on my bullet icon. That's it, all the bullets get added automatically, and the bullets are all set up with what's called a hanging indent. See how the bullet hangs out in the margin and the text flows indented to the right of it. Okay, so now the main problems that I see here are that the bullet is hanging really far away from the text. And also that we're using these really dumb looking round bullets. Everybody uses round bullets. I want something with a little bit more flare. To change the bullets, we need to go to the bullet's dialogue box. And to get there, all you need to do is hold down the option or alt key on your keyboard and click that button one more time. By holding down the option or alt key, you get the options for bullets. Up here at the top, you can see a number of different bullet characters that we could use, the regular old round one that's selected, or an asterisk or a diamond. I don't know who would use those. This one, I kind of like, the one that looks like a double angle bracket. Let's select that and I'll turn on the preview checkbox and move this out of the way so we can see what it does. That looks kind of interesting. Oh, there's one more bullet character here. This one that looks like an A with some accents. I have no idea what that thing is, but I did finally figure out why it shows up for some people and not for others. If you're curious, go to my website, which is creativepro.com, and use the search field to look for weird bullet character. It's kind of an interesting story. Anyway, if you see it, you can just ignore it. Now, look at all these blank boxes. Those are for you to make your own custom bullets. Let's try it. I'll click on the add button, and now it's going to ask me what character I want to use for a bullet, because bullets are always characters from within a font, so you need to tell InDesign which font you want it to pull the character from. In this case, let's choose a font that has a lot of interesting ornaments in it called Minion Pro. Minion Pro ships with InDesign, so everybody should have it. I'll just type MIN and it guesses what font I want, and I'm going to choose the regular style. Now I can simply scroll through this list of all the characters until I see one I like. There's one, that triangle. I'll select that and click okay. So you can see that InDesign adds it to my list where I can select it. Now the last thing we need to do is change those indents. Down here, this is how you make that hanging indent, by the way, a positive left indent and a negative first line indent. Let's change this first line indent to minus one pica. Of course, you could use millimeters or any other measurement system here. That looks good so I'll click okay. And I'll click out here to deselect the text. See, it wasn't that hard to get cool bullets after all, but how about automatic numbers? Well, see up here, next to the bullet button, there's the automatic numbering button. So I'm going to select all those paragraphs again, and this time I'm going to switch to automatic numbering. If you're into web design, you probably call these ordered lists. Now, if it's a very simple list like this, you're done. That's all you need to do. And the good news is that this will update automatically. So for example, if I click at the end of this paragraph and just hit return, I can just start typing and it automatically re-numbers. Now, let's say you don't want that paragraph to be part of the list. It's easy to turn the number off. All you have to do is click the button in the control panel again. Now that paragraph is not being numbered. And if you want this next paragraph to start over at number one again, just place your cursor inside that paragraph and then right click and choose restart numbering. So now you see, one, two, three, skip, and then it starts at one again. Okay, if you need to do anything more complex than what I just showed you, you need to visit the numbering dialogue box. Okay, so I'm going to press command + Z or control + Z a few times to go back to the way that numbered list was. While that text is selected, I'll come back to the control panel and option or alt + click on that icon. Now, a lot of this is self-explanatory, like you can change the format from numbers to say letters or even Roman numerals. I'm not going to do that. You can even choose a character style from this pop-up menu. And this will change the text formatting of just the numbers. I talk about styles in the next chapter, but we happen to have one already created called numbering. So I'll choose that number style here. When I do that, you can see that InDesign applies that style to all the numbering in the list. That looks good, so I'll click okay. Super simple, super quick. Letting your computer update your bullets and numbering is the smart way to use InDesign, so you can save your time for more important design decisions.

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