Adobe InDesign (really) Quick Tips

It’s amaz­ing how long you can use a pro­gram, feel like you know it, then sud­denly dis­cover a sim­ple lit­tle short­cut or tech­nique that will save you a mas­sive amount of time.  It’s a mix­ture of “ah-ha, that’s awe­some!” and a lit­tle dash of “man, why didn’t I know that, I’m such an idiot.”

This just hap­pened to me, I was lis­ten­ing to Episode 73 of the Mar­tini Hour with Deke McClel­land and Colleen Wheeler and they became embroiled in a dis­cus­sion about how to get out of the text-editing mode inside Pho­to­Shop via a key­board short­cut. When you are typ­ing or edit­ing text and you want to access other tools you can’t make them active through the tra­di­tional key­board short cuts, because if you hit the let­ter for the key­board short­cut you’ll  only add that let­ter or if you try to hit return/enter on the main key­board it will just cre­ate a new line like in a word proces­sor. There is, how­ever, a key­board short cut for it in Pho­to­Shop: either the enter key on the num­ber pad or hit CTRL + Enter (PC) / CMD + Return (Mac). Colleen thought it was the ESC key at first, Deke said her con­fu­sion was because she was so used to using that short­cut in InDe­sign to do the same thing and she just expected it to work in the same way in PhotoShop.

That was a light bulb moment for me. I never knew that short­cut in InDe­sign! That is a huge time saver and I wanted to pass it along. When you are typ­ing or edit­ing text within a text box in InDe­sign and you want to switch to a dif­fer­ent tool via a key­board short cut,  all you have to do is hit the ESC key, then you are switched to the direct selec­tion tool with the text box you were typ­ing in selected. It’s pretty handy tip I learned when I least expected it. By the way if you hit ESC in Pho­to­Shop you’ll lose all of your text edits, so don’t get confused.

Here’s the short­cuts sans my ah-ha moment:

Escape text edit­ing within InDesign:

ESC

Escape text edit­ing within PhotoShop:

CMD + Return (Mac)
CRTL + Enter (PC)
Enter on the Num­ber keypad

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