How To Create An Index In Adobe InDesign CC

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Course contents
SECTION: 3
Creative Cloud APP 5:45
SECTION: 12
Workflow Speed Tips 20:41
SECTION: 17
Photoshop & Illustrator 13:32
SECTION: 22
Exporting & Printing Tricks 8:17

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Course info

74 lessons / 9 hours Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hi there, my name is Dan. I am an Adobe Certified Instructor and an Adobe Certified Expert for InDesign and I work as a professional graphic designer. This course is about advanced features, productivity & workflow speed tricks using Adobe InDesign. 

This course is not for people brand new to InDesign. It’s for people who already know and understand the fundamentals. 

If you are already happy adding text & images to InDesign documents then this course is for you. Even if you consider yourself a heavy user, I promise there will be things in here that will blow your InDesign mind. 

You’ll learn advanced font tricks using Typekit & Opentype fonts, font grouping & font pairing. Mastering colour features like the colour theme tool and colour modes as well as professional proofing for colours for print. We’ll set permanent defaults for fonts, colours & will learn how to turn hyphenation off for good, once and for all.  

What would an advanced InDesign course be without all the tactics to fully control paragraphs, auto expanding boxes, spanning & splitting columns. You’ll become a Styles master, using nested styles, grep styles, next styles & advanced object styles.  

We’ll make beautiful charts & graphs for your InDesign documents. You’ll learn the pros & cons of various digital distribution methods including Interactive PDF’s, EPUBs & the amazing Publish Online. 

You’ll become a master of long, text heavy documents, autoflowing, primary text frames & smart text reflow, cross referencing, indexes, text variables & the InDesign book feature. There is entire section dedicated to how to speed up your personal workflow & how to speed up InDesign and get it running super fast. 

We look at interactive forms & scripts. There is just so much we cover and I want to share everything here in the intro but I can’t. Have a look through the video list, there is an amazing amount we cover here in the course. 

If you’re one of those people using InDesign and you know there is probably a better way, a faster way to work then this is your course. 

Daniel Walter Scott

What are the requirements?

  • You will need a copy of Adobe InDesign 2018 or above. But you find that 95% of all the features in this course will work with earlier version of InDesign (e.g. CS6). A free trial can be downloaded from Adobe.

What am I going to get from this course?

  • 70 lectures 5+ hours of well structured content. 
  • Create PDF Forms
  • Master Long Documents.
  • Advanced Fonts
  • Master Styles
  • Shortcut Sheet
  • Create Charts & Infographics
  • Create Interactive Documents
  • Workflow Tactics
  • Shortcuts & Speed Tips
  • Advanced Creative Cloud Features
  • Tips for working with Photoshop & Illustrator
  • Using Scripts 
  • Exporting, Prepress & Printing tricks 
  • You will get the finished files so you never fall behind. 
  • Downloadable exercise files & cheat sheet. 
  • Forum support from me and the rest of the BYOL crew. 
  • Techniques used by professional graphic designers. 
  • Professional workflows and shortcuts. 
  • A wealth of other resources and websites to help your accelerate your career. 

What is the target audience?

  • This course is for people who already know InDesign and want to take their skills and speed to the maximum level. 
  • This is an advanced InDesign course, so you’ll need basic InDesign skills to find this course useful. 
  • This course is perfect for anyone that already knows how to insert images & add text. 
  • If you a completely new to InDesign try my InDesign Essentials course before starting this one.
  • This course is perfect for anyone that has completed my InDesign Essentials course.

Course duration 7 hours 45 mins + your study.
Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Downloads & Exercise files

Download Exercise Files

Transcript

Hi there, in this video we're going to create an index, in InDesign. This beautiful one here tells me, that, chair, the word chair appears on page 2, 4, 9, and 12. I'll show you how to create them automatically, how to update them reasonably automatically, and how to make them as beautiful as this, Pink and Arial. All right, let's get started.

So to create an index, super easy. I've made it a little easier for you in this one unlike my, go and find the headings example in the last video. So what we need to do is open up the Index panel, it's under 'Window', go down to 'Type & Tables', and open up 'Index'. And we just need to add some parts to the index. What I've done is, on page 1, I've got a few things, like chair. I'm going to select it all, and in here, I'm going to click on this option here, it says 'New Index', click on the little page. And then I'm going to click the word 'Add All'. It's going to go through my whole document, and find all uses of chair. Now you'll see, under 'C', there's Chair, and these are all the pages that it's on. We're going to add a few other options, so let's add Shelf. Add you. Make sure you click on 'Add All'.

Adding one is fine, if you want to do it, like per word usage, you might have it just too many times in your document, so you can go through with your 'Find & Change'. So you can go through with your 'Edit', 'Find', and just highlight the words you want to add to the reference, maybe not all of them, and just click 'Add'. I'm going to add all of mine, so we've got Chair, there's one called Table. I'm going to add you, 'Add All', and click 'Done'. And there was one more, I swear there was one more, I can't see a Chair, Shelf, Table. It doesn't matter.

 

So next thing I need to do is decide where I'm going to put it, traditionally at the back. So I'm going to go to my last page. If you don't have a last page, blank page, like I do currently, you can just grab a new page. I'm going to go to page 16 here. I'm going to zoom out so I can see the whole thing, move it to the side. And now you need to generate it, and it's just this option here. It says 'Generate Index', click on that. I'm going to leave all the defaults. Click 'OK'. And I'm going to drag out an index. I'm going to make mine just one column, just because my index is not very big. So one of the things that's generated obviously, it's got my C's, and there's Chair, and they're all out there like a traditional index.

What I'd like to do is change the styles. And what InDesign has done, is it's gone to-- let's click off in the background, so we got nothing selected, let's go to 'Window', let's go to 'Styles', and let's go to 'Paragraph Styles'. You'll notice that it's created a few extra styles for me. So it's created 'Index Level 1' which is this small type here, the Index Title, which is the big thing at the top here, and the section here, which is the letters here in bold. So what you need to do is, go through, and let's say I want to change my Index Title, double click on it, and say actually, 'Basic Character Formats'. I'm going to pick the Arial that I've been using in this particular document. Font size is a lot smaller, you can see it updating over here. And just go through and update that. Alternatively you can just select it in here. Pick a font, I'm going to pick 'Arial Bold'. My lovely color. And then you can right click this, and say, I'd like to 'Redefine Style'. Either way you like to work. Do the same thing for these guys.

So you need to update the style, because, say you do some changes in here and you're like, "Okay, I'm going to make this Arial, but I'm not going to update the style." 'Arial Italic'. I'm going to do it for all of these. Here's my Eye Dropper, steal the formating. Paint the formating on that. So I've updated it, but not updated the style. What happens is, if I go and move, say, Chair, if I delete Chair from page 1, 'Command-J-1', and I go to 'chair', say goodbye. What I need to do now is go back to my last page, 'Command-J-16'. Now this is a two stage updating process. Don’t know why it's so confusing, but that's why we got this video. What we need to do is, click on this 'Refresh' button, and you're like "Oh, update preview. Great. Hmm." All it does is update in here, that this no longer has one in there. We don't do it, but it will still have one, as one of the options.

So once we've done that though, we're going to have to update this. Why are you updating? So that the contents is easy. This thing here, we need to do something a little weird. You just click on this option here, 'Generate Index', and you're like, "Why do I make a new one?" But see in here, it's got a little check box that says 'Replace Existing Index'. And you're like, "Ugh, okay." See, update. It updates, removes that one but because we didn't update our Paragraph Style it returns to our Minion.

So that's how to update it, and just make sure that when you do any changes to the styling you go and-- you can see the little '+' there, you right click it, and say, actually redefine this style for me. What I'll also do is, go into Paragraph Styles and actually push the padding from the right hand side, let's make an Indent. Now I'm going to 'Redefine Style'. I use Redefine Style all the time, that is a shortcut. It's a bit of a hard one I guess, it's there. It's all buttons plus 'R'. So 'Command-Option-Shift' on a Mac, and 'Control-Alt-Shift' on a PC. I use it a lot anyway, it's a shortcut that I like. Now if I refresh it, it's going to look like that again.

So that is how to create an index. Let's get on to the next video.

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