From the course: InDesign Secrets

302 Automate a numbered list with check boxes - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

302 Automate a numbered list with check boxes

- [Instructor] We had a question show up in the InDesign Secrets forums recently that really stumped me. Somebody was asking how to make a list, a series of paragraphs, that are both numbered and have bullets that look like checkboxes, like this one here. Well in this case I just faked it. I just typed a character from a font that looks like a checkbox, and then a Tab, and then the number, and so on. That's fine, but if you had to do dozens or hundreds of these, and if you still needed that text to be editable, like if you had to add or remove items from the list, this would be a nightmare. So this person wanted to setup the paragraph styles automatically, and I just couldn't think of how to do it, but then Kelly Vaughn, who runs the site Document Geek, came up with a solution, and it is so clever, it's so out of the box that I just had to share it with you. I'm going to scroll over here to the left side of my page, and you can see I have the same list, but without all that formatting. Here's how you can do it. First, you need to select all that text. You can do that by double-clicking to switch to the Type tool, and then select all of that text, come up here to the control panel, and click on the Numbered List button. That's the one in the middle of the control panel when the control panel is set to Paragraph formatting. I cover how to make automatic numbered lists like this in my title, InDesign Essential Training here in the online training library. So while that text is still selected, I'm going to come over here to the Paragraph Styles panel, and I'm going to hold down the Option key or the Alt key on Windows and click on the New Paragraph Style button. That forces InDesign to open the New Paragraph Style dialog box, and it sucks all of that formatting, like the numbered list, into this dialog box. Up here I'll give it a name. I'll just call it numbered list, but of course you can call it anything you want. I'm going to turn on the Apply Style to Selection checkbox. That way this paragraph style will automatically be applied to the selected paragraphs. I want to come down here to the lower left corner, and I want to make sure that the Add to CC Library checkbox is turned off. I hate that feature. I don't want my paragraph styles to automatically show up inside the CC library, so I leave that turned off. Now before I click OK, I'm going to click the Bullets and Numbering item in this list to switch to that pane, and I can see immediately that I have a little bit of a mistake here. I don't want the Mode to be set to Start At number one, because that'll make all of them start at number one. Instead I'm going to change this to Continue from Previous Number. That looks good, so I'll click OK, and you can see that InDesign creates the numbered list paragraph style and it applies it to all of those paragraphs. Okay, now I need a second paragraph style, one with a bullet that looks like a checkbox. So I'm going to come back over to the Paragraph Styles panel, and I'm going to Option or Alt + Click on the New Paragraph Style button once more. That opens up the dialog box and this time I'm going to create a style called checkbox bullet. Of course you can call it anything you want. Now in this case I do not want this paragraph style to be applied to those paragraphs, so I'll turn off that checkbox. Now I'm going to choose Bullets and Numberings, and I'm going to change my List Type from Numbers to Bullets. Now I need a bullet that looks like a checkbox, right? But there isn't one here, so I'll come over to the right side of the dialog box, and I'll click Add. And I happen to know that there is a checkbox character inside the Wingdings font, or you could use Zapf Dingbats or some other font, but I'm just going to come over here and type W-I-N-G, for Wingdings, then I'll hit Tab to apply that, and now I can see all the characters from inside that font. So I'll scroll down here a little bit, I'll see a checkbox character that I want, so I'll click it. I want to make sure the Remember Font with Bullet checkbox is turned on, because it is important that this character be linked to this font. Now I'll click OK, and you'll see that that character is now added to this dialog box, so I can select it, and then click OK. So there we go, we now have two paragraph styles, one with a number, and one with a checkbox bullet, but you can only apply one paragraph style at a time, right? Well here's where Kelly got clever. She used a feature that you'd never expect to merge these two together. She used the table of contents feature. Weird, right? But here's how it works. First I'm going to choose this text frame with a Selection tool and I'm going to drag it off the page. But I do need to make sure that at least a little bit of that text frame is touching the page in order for this feature to work. So I've moved it off to the paste board, but a little bit of it is still touching the page. Next I'm going to choose the Layout menu, and I'll choose Table of Contents. Now I'm going to delete this word Contents up here at the top, because I don't need a title. And down here I'm going to double-click on the words numbered list. That moves it from the list on the right to the list on the left. In other words it's adding it to my table of contents. That's the paragraph style that I have applied to those paragraphs, right? Now when you're working inside the table of contents dialog box, you want to make sure you see all of your options, so if you see a button that says More Options, then click it to make sure you see all of these features down here. Now in this section down here I'm going to choose from the Page Number popup menu, No Page Number, because I don't want any page numbers associated with this list. I just want the text. Up above that, in the Entry Style popup menu, I'm going to choose the checkbox bullet paragraph style. That's the paragraph style that gives it a checkbox. The last thing I'm going to do here is turn off the Create PDF Bookmarks checkbox, because I do not need those. All right, when I click OK, InDesign is going to look for all of the paragraph styles that are set to numbered list, and it's going to give me a new list and apply the checkbox bullet paragraph style to it. Let's try it out. I'll click OK, and InDesign loads up my cursor with my new table of contents, and I'll click and drag out a text frame, and there we go. It's a numbered list that also has checkbox bullets, and the really cool thing is I can always update this later. For example, I'll scroll over here and take out one of these, like sky diving. I'll triple-click on it to select that line, and delete it. Of course InDesign automatically updates all the numbering over here. Now to update the list over here, the one on my page, I simply click inside that text frame, come up to the Layout menu, and choose Update Table of Contents. InDesign updates that list. When I click OK, you can see that InDesign has removed that from the list. Boom, we're done. Isn't this awesome? Thank you Kelly Vaughn for this very cool trick.

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