How do I make an automatic table of contents in Adobe InDesign?

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SECTION: 5
PROJECT 4: Long Business Document 1:46:26

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Course info

82 lessons / 7 hours 4 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hi there, my name is  Dan. I am a graphic designer and Adobe Certified Instructor (ACI)  for InDesign.

Together we will work through real life projects starting with a simple company flyer, then a brochure & a company newsletter. We’ll make business cards & take control of a really long annual report.

We will work with colour, picking your own and also using corporate colours. You will explore how to choose & use fonts like a professional. We will find, resize & crop images for your documents.

There are projects for you to complete, so you can practise your skills & use these for your creative portfolio.

In this course I supply exercise files so you can play along. I will also save my files as I go through each video so that you can compare yours to mine - handy if something goes wrong.

Know that I will be around to help - if you get lost you can drop a post on the video 'Questions and Answers' below each video and I'll be sure to get back to you.

I will share every design trick I have learnt in the last 15 years of designing. My goal is for you to finish this course with all the necessary skills to start making beautiful documents using InDesign.


What are the requirements?

  • You will need a copy of Adobe InDesign CC 2018 or above. A free trial can be downloaded from Adobe.
  • No previous design skills are needed.
  • No previous InDesign skills are needed.

What am I going to get from this course?

  • 76 lectures 5+ hours of well structured content.
  • You'll learn to design a flyer, newsletter, brochure, annual report & business cards.
  • Learn how to create PDF files ready for printing.
  • 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 new career path.

What is the target audience?

  • No previous InDesign experience is necessary.
  • This course is for people completely new to InDesign. No previous design or publishing experienced is necessary.
  • This is a relaxed, well paced introduction that will enable you to produce most common publications. Only basic computing skills are necessary - If you can send emails and surf the internet then you will cope well with our course.

Course duration 6 hours 20 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.

Certificates

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Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

Downloads & Exercise files

Download Exercise Files Download Completed Files

Transcript

Hi there, in this video we're going to make a Table of Contents like this, but we're going to do it automatically, where it pulls all the titles that we've used through our documents, and automatically adds them to this list with the correct number, and Styles it automatically. All right, let's go and learn how to do that.

First thing is, I'm going to jump to page 3. That's where I'm going to put my Table of Contents, double click it. Zoom in a little bit. And I need to go to 'Layout', 'Table of Contents'. Now the one thing that makes Table of Contents, especially this automatic one work is the use of Paragraph Styles. So during this tutorial, we've gone through and applied this thing called Subheading to all of the Headings. The cool thing about it is, if I add it to this, it's going to add it to my Table of Contents. If I leave it just like this, click 'OK', drag it out, you'll see that all my headings, the Chief Executive Review, Tracking Our Progress, you can see here, Executive Review, Tracking Our Progress, it's all been included in the Table of Contents.

So, one thing I want to do though - I'm going to 'Edit', 'Undo', 'Edit', 'Undo' - is apply Styles while I'm doing it. So 'Layout', 'Table of Contents'. I want my Subheading to be added. Click it across. Now this is the Title. It's just that words that go over the top. I'm going to call it Table of Contents. And the Style, it's going to have, we'll give it the 'TOC Title'. Can you see, these are the headings that I've made, but now there's this magical new one called TOC. Table of Contents Title. This is one that InDesign's going to generate for us, that we can update. Same thing goes for the actual contents of our Table of Contents. If I leave it, we saw that it had the same Styles as our Headings. Instead of same Style, I'm going to click on this new one, 'TOC Body Copy'. Brand new, made for us for InDesign.

We can adjust the Styling afterwards. Cool. Let's click 'OK'. Same thing, I'm going to click, hold, and drag it out. And we've got our Table of Contents. So if you don't have any Paragraph Styles, you either have to manually type it all out, copy and paste, and try and work out what the page numbers are. That's the manual way, or you're going to have to go through, create a Paragraph Style, and go through and apply it to all the headings. Then you can do it automatically like we have here.

Let's look at our Styles panel. Go to 'Window', 'Styles', 'Paragraph Styles'. So two new ones have been generated. We've got TOC Title and TOC Body Copy. So that one, TOC Title, controls the contents, and TOC Body Text controls all of this. It's a pretty ugly looking Paragraph Style, so we're going to go and adjust it. So, Table of Contents, this TOC Style, I'm going to go through and say, actually I'm going to use my 'Roboto', I'll use the 'Slab Bold'. I'm going to make sure it's 'left aligned'. I'm going to use 'red', and you can see, like we did earlier, we're going to right click it, and say 'Redefine Style'. The reason we do that is because if we update the Table of Contents, it reverts to its original Style. So if we don't redefine the Style, like this one here, say we go and make some changes just quickly, and I'll make it smaller.

I'm going to pick Arial. We do all this, and then we have to go through this bit that says 'Layout', and it says 'Update Table of Contents'. We've moved things from different pages. If I click 'Update', you can see, it updates it great, but it also reverts it back to the ugly looking Paragraph Style. So, let's select it. Let's make it 'Roboto Medium'. I'm going to change it to '10'. I'm going to increase the Leading a bit. So before I move on, I need to right click, and say 'Redefine Style'. Now what we can do is, we can go through and say-- say this is just a text change, it's called Chief Executive's Review, now it's Chief Executive's Rant. And if I come up to here, you will notice it's not dynamic. It doesn't update automatically, but I can manually go and say 'Layout', and go to 'Update Table of Contents'. And it's updated it to Rant. And it's given this lovely new Paragraph Style.

So we've gone through, and adjusted it even if we change numbers, so this one here, say in front of this one, I put a Column Break. So 'Type', 'Insert Special Characters', no, 'Insert Break Character', and go to 'Column Break'. The Tracking our Progress is now on page 6. Up here, where are you? There you are. We need to go, so it's on 5, just go up to 'Layout'. Actually you have to click inside of it. So grab the Type Tool, click inside, 'Layout'. 'Update Table of Contents', you'll see, it adjusts. And all the ones after it have adjusted as well.

Next thing we're going to do, and the thing I've been ignoring, is these weird numbers that are real jammed up to the side. So we're going to learn Tabs in the next video. And that will help us fix that.

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