How To Make Paragraphs Span 2 Columns In Adobe InDesign CC

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

Questions

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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 look at the secrets of splitting and spanning columns, where we take this first paragraph that I really want to cross over both columns, and these guys down the bottom here, I want them to be in separate little columns, within a column. We can do that simply and easily within InDesign like this. So this one spans, this one splits, it's all just one text box, not lots of text boxes all hacked together. Let's go and learn how to do that now in InDesign.

First thing we need to do is, we've got a single text box here, I'm on page 4. Our text box spans both these two columns. I want to split it to match our column guides down the back there. To do it with the Black Arrow, have it selected, and along here you should be able to see the number of columns. I'm going to have two. We're going to match the gutter which is the space between the columns that we did earlier on, and it was 54 pixels. I said I'll match up. This kind of shows you-- I'm going to hit 'W' to show the preview. I want my first paragraph actually to span both of these columns, and the text to suck underneath. You can do it easily, grab the Type tool, click anywhere in this first paragraph. And along the top here, we need to go from 'Character' to 'Paragraph'. Then along on the right, quite far along, you need to find this little guy, looks like a, I don't know, bridge or the outer trail on for something. And we're going to go from 'None' and we're going to 'Span All'. And, it goes and spans that whole column.

That's really handy especially if you're being in the past just putting him in his own text box. Now you don't have to, you can flow along with the rest of the text. That can also be kept in a Paragraph style, make it super easy to use. So that is how to span columns. Let's look at how to split columns. I'm going to go to our 'Exercise Files'. I want you to go into '03 Magazine', and double click 'Magazine Text'. What we'll do is we'll copy this out. This little chunk here, 'Wood Types', I'm going to copy it. I'm going to jump back into InDesign. And I'm going to make a space for it, about there. I'm going to paste it in. Now, what I'd like to is, this 'Wood Types' I'm actually just going to make it bold, because it's going to be my heading. There's these six options down the bottom here. I would like them to be kind of side by side, in a nice set of columns.

Now I could copy and paste these out into another separate text box, split that into three columns, then try and paste it back in as an in line graphic, and it will work but it's not as easy as this option. So with all three of them selected with the Type tool, switch to 'Paragraph'. And the same place we were a second ago, instead of spanning, we're going to split too. So it's going to split these column into two parts. So we've got kind of too many columns within another column. Super useful, super quick.

I'm going to add bullet points while I'm here. You can see, it's just a really nice quick easy way to add those columns rather than jumping out to another text box or trying to play around with tabs.

All right, that's going to be it for splitting and spanning columns. Let's get on to the next video.

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