From the course: InDesign 2023 Essential Training

Inserting, deleting, and moving pages - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2023 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. Now you can find most of InDesign page features up here in the layout menu, inside the pages submenu. But you can find even more inside the pages panel on the right side of the screen in the dock. The pages panel shows me little thumbnails of each page in my document. And if I want to go directly to, say, the second spread, all I need to do is double click on the numbers underneath that spread. That takes me right there and centers it in the window. But you know, I hate having to scroll up and down through that panel. So I want to show you a little trick. First, I'm going to make this pages panel a little bit larger by dragging the lower left corner. Now I'm going to go to the pages panel menu and look inside the view pages panel. Right now this is set to vertically where the spreads are on top of each other, and it's just not a very good use of screen real estate. So instead, I'm going to choose horizontally. I just think this is a much better layout, but you can do it either way you want, vertically or horizontally. Okay, so now if I want to jump to, say, page 28, all I need to do is double click on that icon and it takes me right there. Now I'm going to add a new page by clicking the new page button down here at the bottom of the panel. When I click that, InDesign adds a new blank page after whatever page is selected in the pages panel. And I had just jumped to 28, right? So when I click the button it added a new page after that one. Now you can see in the pages panel that all of the other pages shuffle so they stay in two page spreads. And that's because this is a facing pages document. Now, if I want to add more than one page at a time I can use the insert pages feature and I can get that by going back to the pages panel menu and choosing insert pages. Here I can type in exactly how many pages I want, say two, and where I want to put them. Let's say I'll put them at the end of the document. There you go, two new blank pages. Now, another way to get a new page in InDesign is to duplicate one of the pages that you already have. 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. So in this case, I want a duplicate of this spread up here, pages 24 and 25. So I'm going to select both of those pages by clicking once on the numbers underneath the spread. Click twice and I would actually jump to those pages but I don't need to do that, so I just click once. Then I'll hold down the Option key on the Mac or Alt key on Windows and drag these numbers until I see a vertical line appear between the spreads. When I see that line, it means put it here right after the spread. When I let go, InDesign makes a duplicate of that spread right where I wanted it. Now, of course the pages panel acts kind of like a slide tray. If you have a bunch of images or slides in a tray, you can move them around anywhere you want, right? So if I want to move this new spread someplace else, all I have to do is click on it and drag. For example, I'll drag this one down to the end of the document. Again, I'm looking for that vertical line to tell me where InDesign is going to drop it. Great, and as soon as InDesign puts it into place, all the other pages reflow to keep the documents as facing pages. Finally, sometimes you need to delete pages and you can do that in the pages panel too. For example, I'm going to go ahead and delete the blank pages I added. So I'll click on one of them, and now I can hold on the Command key on the Mac or Control key on Windows and then select my other pages. That lets me select pages that are not next to each other. Or if you hold down the Shift key, you can actually select continuous pages, like a range of pages. Now to delete them, all I have to do is click on the little trashcan icon at the bottom of the panel. InDesign warns me that there may be objects on those pages. So do I really want to do it? Yes, yes, I do. The more pages you have in your document the more important it is to manage them well. So the better you know the pages panel the more efficient you'll be.

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