From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Creating and applying paragraph styles - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Creating and applying paragraph styles

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- [Instructor] Styles are a way to take a whole bunch of formatting and give it a name. And InDesign lets you create styles for a character formatting, paragraph formatting, object formatting, even table formatting. Styles are so important because they let you apply or change a lot of formatting with a single click, so they really boost productivity. For example, here in this publication, you can see that a bunch of text over here on the left side of the page needs to be formatted. To do that, we need to open our paragraph styles panel, over here in the doc. Now, if you don't see your paragraph styles panel there, then you want to choose the advanced workspace in this pop-up menu up in the top of the screen. Or you could go to the window menu, choose Styles, and then choose Paragraph Styles. Let's apply our first style. I'm going to place my text cursor in this first paragraph of the text frame. Here in the paragraph styles panel, you can see that the basic paragraph style has been applied to that paragraph. We want to avoid basic paragraph as much as we can. It's much better to apply your own paragraph styles. And in this case, we have one. Let's make this panel a little bit larger. Here's the one we want, flower headers. I simply click on it and you can see that a whole bunch of formatting was applied to that paragraph. It applied a font, span columns, shading, and more. Now, notice that I did not have to select the entire paragraph to apply it. You can if you want to, but all you really have to do is click your cursor inside the paragraph. Okay, let's do a few more. Let's click the next paragraph down. Now I'm going to come over here and choose Common Names, and then these paragraphs over here, let's just drag over a little of all of them. All of these are going to be a paragraph style called Body Copy. Now you can see that we were able to format all this text really quickly. If I had to do that manually applying first the font, then the size and the letting and all of that, it would've taken so much longer. By the way, later on in this chapter, I'll talk about how you can edit these styles if you need to change the formatting. But first, let's talk about how to create your own new style. I want to create a new style for this paragraph down here. Now, the easiest way to make a paragraph style is to create an example that you're going to base your paragraph style off of. Fortunately, we have a paragraph style over on the right side of the page that has all the formatting we want. I've already formatted this with the right size and font and everything. So to make a paragraph style based on that example, you just place your text cursor inside that paragraph. Then go to the paragraph styles panel and choose New Paragraph Style. Now, here's the important thing. Because the cursor was inside that paragraph, it grabbed all of that formatting and it dropped it in here. So now all you need to do is give it a name. I'll just call it Info. Now, of course, if you want to, you could go through each of these panes one at a time, setting its font and style and size and indents and tabs and so on, but as you can see, that would take a lot longer than just doing it once on your page and then sucking all of that information into the dialog box. Oh, before we click Okay, I want to go back to the general pane and show you two more things. First, I like turning on the Apply Style to Selection checkbox. You don't have to do that, but it's convenient. This way it will make the style and apply it to whatever was selected on the page. Also, notice that you can apply a keyboard shortcut to your style here. That can be super helpful for commonly used styles. But you just have to be sure that you're using a keyboard shortcut that isn't already reserved for some other InDesign feature or else it won't work. Great. I'll just click Okay, and you can see that it made the style and then applied it to that paragraph. Now, let's try applying it to this paragraph style on the left page. Place my cursor in there, click once and boom, it's done. And this shows one of the most important reasons to use styles, and that is consistency. Every time you apply it, you know you're going to get exactly the same formatting. Paragraph styles are one of the most important productivity features in InDesign. The more you use them, the more efficient you'll get.

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