From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Inserting, deleting, and moving pages - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Inserting, deleting, and moving pages

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- [Instructor] You can use InDesign to make anything from a one-sided business card to a book, thousands of pages long. But as soon as you go beyond that one page business card, you're going to need to learn how to manage your pages, adding pages, moving them around, deleting them, and so on. And that's what we're going to cover here. You can find some of InDesign's page features up here in the layout panel, inside the pages sub menu. But you know, I rarely use that. Instead, I usually use the pages panel, over here in the doc on the right side of the screen. The pages panel shows me little thumbnails of all the pages in my document, and if I want to go directly to the second spread, all I have to do is double click the numbers underneath that spread. There we go, it goes there and centers it in the screen. But you know, in a really long document, I hate having to scroll up and down so much in the pages panel. So I'm going to make this pages panel a little bit larger by dragging the lower left corner, and then I'm going to head up to the pages panel menu in the upper right corner. Down here, I'll choose view pages, and instead of viewing them vertically, I'm going to change this to horizontally. I just think this is a much better layout, better use of screen real estate, but you can do it either way you want, vertically or horizontally. Okay, so now if I want to go to page 28, all I have to do is double click on it. That jumps right to that page. But what about adding pages? I'll add a new page after this one by clicking on the new page button at the bottom of the panel. The new page button adds a new page after whatever page is selected in the pages panel. I was on page 28, so it added a new page, 29, and all the other pages shuffle so they stay in two-page spreads, and that's because this is a facing pages document. If I want to add more than one page at a time, I can use the insert pages feature. I can get that by going back to the panel menu and choosing insert pages. This lets me type in exactly how many pages I want. I'll type two pages, and I want to place this not after page 29, but say at the end of the document. When I click okay, you'll see it adds those pages here. Another way to get a new page in InDesign is to duplicate one of the pages that you already have. Now, I find this very useful when I'm laying out pages quickly because I often already have a page that looks approximately like what I want. In this case, I want a duplicate of this spread, pages 24 and 25. So I'm going to select both of those pages by clicking once on the numbers underneath the spread. Clicking twice would jump there, but clicking once just selects it. Then I'll hold down the option or the alt key on my keyboard and drag those numbers until I see a little vertical bar up here. When I see a line, that means put it here after the spread. And when I let go, InDesign makes a duplicate of the spread right where I wanted it. Now, of course, the pages panel acts kind of like a tray full of pictures. If you have a bunch of photos on a tray, you can move them around anywhere you want, right? So for example, if I wanted this new spread to be someplace else, I could simply click on the numbers and drag them around. Once again, I'm looking for that little vertical line to tell me where InDesign is going to drop it. When I let go of the mouse button, you can see all the pages reflow to keep the documents as facing left and right hand pages. Now, of course, sometimes you need to delete pages, and you can do that in the pages panel too. For example, I'll click on this page up here, that blank one, and I want to select the other blank ones too, I'll hold down the command key on the Mac, or control key on Windows, and click, and then I'll command or control click again. That modifier key lets me select pages that are not next to each other. Or if you use the shift key instead, you can actually select a continuous range of pages. To delete all those pages, I'll simply click the little trashcan icon in the lower right corner. InDesign gives me a warning, it says, "These pages actually do have objects on them. Do you really want to delete them?" And I say, "Yes, yes, I do." There we go, that's looking better. Now, the more pages you have in your document, the more important it is to manage them well. The better you know the pages panel, the more efficient you're going to be.

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