From the course: Time-Saving Tips Using InDesign

The home screen - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: Time-Saving Tips Using InDesign

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The home screen

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- [Instructor] Since InDesign Creative Cloud was released, we got introduced to the home screen. Well, we've actually been introduced to quite a few renditions of this including the welcome screen, start screen or workspace, and now the home screen. People have a love-hate relationship with this screen and I'd like to show you how it's been improved in InDesign 2020. Now I'm starting here with no document open in InDesign because this is the appearance that most people are going to see when they just launch InDesign without a document open. And traditionally we've been kind of stuck with this screen. If you've been using InDesign long enough you remember the days where you had kind of a blank canvas and you could create a new document from there and you could adjust your workspace, but the home screen has had a tendency to kind of take over. Well in InDesign 2020 what I'd like to show you is you'll notice in the upper left hand corner of the screen you'll have the InDesign icon, and if you click on that it basically hides the home screen and gets you back to the traditional InDesign interface. Now what's really nice is it's not a all or nothing proposition because even once you get into InDesign here, you can always come up here and click on the little home icon and that'll take you back to your home screen. So the home screen definitely has value. It's a great place to access files that you've recently opened. It's also a great place to create documents from standard presets. You can also view tutorials on here if that's something you're looking for, ways you can learn more about InDesign from that screen as well. But what I'm going to do here is I'll come back up here once again and click on the InDesign icon. If I wanted to open up a document, I could just double click on this blank background here and that's going to bring up the open dialog box. So I'm going to navigate here to chapter two and open up the 02_01 file. And now I have an InDesign document open where I can begin working. Now with a document open, once again, what's really kind of cool is you can click on the home icon and if you wanted to open up another document that you had been working on, you can just kind of double click on one of these icons and that's going to open up this document in another tab within the InDesign interface. So you can kind of leverage that home screen now, even though a document is open or with no document open at all. The home screen gets out of your way in InDesign 2020 but is still easily accessible when you need it.

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