In this video we're going to look at why Paragraph Styles are essential for InDesign and are super awesome, and time saving. It means that I can do stuff like this. Highlight this, and go, boom, I'm the Heading. Go to this next line, and say, if I can click it, go boom, on first paragraph. Construction… I'm going to stop saying boom. But you get the idea, all of this is going to be Body Copy. You can see with Styles, and life is good, and quick, and easy.

To create a Paragraph Style we're going to select the thing we want to turn into a Style, and in our case, I want to do something slightly different. I want to make 'Roboto', make it the 'Bold' version. I'm going to make it 'All Caps'. There's this little capital Ts here, to make it caps. And I'm going to make it color of our red. And you can see, the underline changed with it because we did that in the previous video. Awesome. Do I like these colons now? Anyway, so we've done that. That's going to be my Sub Heading for all my columns. So I'd like to turn this into a Style.

We do that by going to 'Window', 'Styles', 'Paragraph Styles'. There's lots of styles. This is the one you're going to use the most, 'Paragraph Styles'. So I'm going to move this over here. You're given one by default. Just like, if you've ever used Word, it's normal. Just the kind of basic one. What we want to do is, with this selected, click on this little turned up page here to create a new Style. Double click 'Paragraph Style 1'. Let's give it a name, I'm going to call this one 'Green at Heart'. I keep adding these acronyms because I work on multiple clients and I want to know-- because if I just call it Body Copy, or Sub Heading, you can copy and paste Styles from one document to another, and you can just have two Sub Headings, and you're like, "Hmm." You don't know what client it's for.

So there's my Sub Heading, and you can see what it's pulling through. It's pulling through all the stuff that make this. Yours might be longer, or shorter, depending on what changes you've made. Mine's Roboto, Bold, 10 points, all these things are getting captured. One thing to do whenever you're making a Paragraph Style is just to make sure it's not 'Based On'. If this is 'Based On', and it has something that says anything other than 'No Paragraph' style, it will just run into complications later on. I like to keep them all separate especially when you're new, makes everything super rock solid, and understandable.

When you start basing it on other Paragraph Styles, you delete one, and a bit of a chain reaction happens, but just so you know, always keep an eye out on 'Based On', and make sure it says 'No Paragraph Style'. Let's click OK. Nothing really has happened. So I'll just capture the style we can reuse. And this is what we're going to do. We're going to select this, and we're going to go-- how good is that? I'm going to remove the colon because I don't like it. But it's a really quick way of sharing that around.

The next thing, I'm going to delete the colon. And we're going to set some other Paragraph Styles. Now, I've got this stuff here, I would like to-- I'm going to select all of this. And this is going to be my Body Copy. I should have probably done it first, when I could select it all. But I'm going to have to select this bit and apply it to the two other parts You'll probably start with your Body Copy because it's easier to select it there. It's easier to select it then. But let's go and do it.

So I've got it selected, it's 'Based On' the old 'Basic' one. We're going to make a new one, double click it, we're going to call this one 'Green at Hearth Body Copy". I'm just going to make sure it doesn't say 'Based On' anything else. Click OK. And that's pulled through my '10 points', it's got my 'Space After'. I know nothing's changing, but all you need to do is make sure this is applied to all of them. So, highlight this one, make sure it is ‘GaH Body Copy’. Select all of this. Do the same thing, make sure it's the Body Copy.

Why do we have to do it? Let's say I didn't - I'll undo that - I forgot to apply it to this. And later on, we go and make a change to that Paragraph Style. So let's have nothing selected, double click Body Copy. And in here, I want to go to 'Basic Character Formats'. Let's say the client's not using Roboto anymore. They want to go back to Arial. And we click OK. Arial is not a good enough change. Let's go and change it for Arial, and make it Bold. You can see, they've all changed because they're all linked to this Body Copy. This one didn't, because we didn't apply it before, so I'm going to go 'undo'. Back to when life is good, and make sure you are all part of the Body Copy gang.

Before we go, we're going to go and make a couple of other ones. I'll apply this one, select this one here, and I'm going to click this, click this, and this is going to be called 'Green at Heart'. Now there is a special name for this type of pull out type thing but I can't remember off the top of my head. Let's call this one 'First Paragraph'. Make sure it's not 'Based On' anything, click OK. We'll also do it-- you'll notice that I accidentally only selected one line. So 'First Paragraph', great, over there. And I'll do the same thing for this heading here. So, this one, you call this one 'Heading'. Call it 'Green at Heart Heading'. 'Based On', 'No Paragraph Style', click OK.

So where this becomes even better is when you start working on other pages. So I'm going to bring in some text on page 5 here. I'm going to bring in 'Article 2'. I'm going to make sure it's 'Remove All Styles'. I'm going to drag out a nice big box for it to go in from this side to this side. Get in there. And I'm going to select it all, and put in my Body Copy first. You can see, how quick, and nice and easy that is. Then there is this bit here, which says-- that was my First Paragraph. There is my Sub Headings. You can see, now we're cooking.

This is what makes InDesign and Paragraph Styles super useful for any kind of daily user of InDesign. Let's go and leave this here now. In the next video we'll look at updating and redefining styles after you've made them. We'll get that into it's own little video. All right, I'll see you over there.