From the course: InDesign 2020 Essential Training

Inserting, deleting, and moving pages - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2020 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 them, moving them around, deleting them, and so on. And that's what we're going to cover here. Now all of InDesign's page features show up in two places, the Pages sub-menu underneath the Layout menu, or the Pages panel over here on the right side of my screen. But the Pages panel has all of the features from the menu plus a lot more, so we'll focus on that. Now this Pages panel shows me little thumbnails of each page in my document. And if I want to go directly to the second spread, I'll simply scroll down a little bit and then double click on the numbers beneath the spread. That takes me right to the spread, and it centers it in the window. But I hate having to scroll around inside this panel. So I'm going to make this Pages panel a little bit larger by clicking and dragging in the lower left corner of the panel. And this layout in the panel, where each spread is on top of the other, is just not a very good use of screen real estate. Instead, I'm going to open the Pages panel menu up here in the upper right corner. I'm going to come down to View Pages, and I'm going to change this to Horizontally. I think this is a much better layout, but you can do it either way you want, vertically or horizontally. Let's go ahead and make this a little bit smaller. So now if I want to go right to page 28, I just double click on it. So the Pages panel is a great way to move from page to page or spread to spread. 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 page after whatever page is selected in the Pages panel. I had double clicked on page 28, right? So when I clicked the button, it added the new page after page 28. Then all of the other pages shuffled, 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 come up here to the Pages panel menu and choose Insert Pages. This lets me choose how many pages I want. Let's say two pages. And it lets me choose where I want to put them. For example, it could be after this page, before this page, or at the start or end of the document. I'm going to put these two blank pages at the end of the document. 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. And 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. And then I'll hold down the Option or the Alt key on my keyboard and drag these numbers until I see a little vertical line appear. When I see that line, it means put it here after this spread. 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 slide tray. If you have a bunch of images or slides in a tray, you can move them around anywhere you want, right? So, for example, if I want this new spread someplace else, all I need to do is click and drag it. I'm going to drag it down in between these spreads. There's my duplicate, and once again, as soon as InDesign puts it into place, all the 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. I'll just select this page over here, this blank one. I select it by clicking once on it. Then I'm going to select these other blank pages that I added. So I'm going to hold down the Command key on the Mac or Control key on Windows and click on them. 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, you know, like a range of pages. Now to delete them, all I have to do is click on that little trash can in the lower right corner. InDesign thinks those pages have something on them, so it warns me. And I'm going to go ahead and click OK. The more pages you have in your document, the more important it is to manage then well. So the better you know that Pages panel, the more efficient you'll be.

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