
Adobe InDesign Introduction
Master the essentials of Adobe InDesign and learn to create professional documents, work with text and images, and format layouts with confidence.
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Course overview
Duration: 2 days (13 hours)
This InDesign course teaches you how to create new and edit existing documents using a variety of techniques to work with text, tables, graphics and colour.
Pre-requisites:
No existing InDesign knowledge is required. Basic computing skills, including working with File Explorer/Finder is essential.

Objectives
By the end of the course you will be able to:
- Navigate confidently around the interface, selecting the appropriate tool and work with a variety of panels
- Create new documents working with multiple pages and spreads
- Apply basic character and paragraph formatting
- Create and apply brand colours using the swatches panel
- Manipulate text and graphic frames
- Import and position image across pages, update and fix missing links
- Draw basic shapes
- Create and apply parent pages
- Create, edit and apply paragraph and character styles
- Create and edit tables
- Reuse assets by storing them in a Creative Cloud Library
- Explore new AI features
- Output to PDF

Content
Getting Started
- Introducing menus, tools, and panels.
- Selecting and creating a Workspace.
- Open, Close and Save files.
- Save to the Cloud (.INDC).
- Change zoom magnification
Preferences
- Set the interface colour and user interface scaling.
- File and clipboard handling.
Setting up a Document
- Create a new document.
- Add a document bleed and slug.
- Use Document Set-up to amend existing settings.
- Work with the Pages panel to add, delete, and reorganise pages.
- Swap between Normal and Preview mode.
- Create and edit Guides.
- Show/hide, lock and unlock guides.
Drawing
- Create basic shapes.
- Adjusting the stroke width.
- Apply a fill and stroke colour using default swatches and unnamed colours.
- Apply a gradient to a fill or stroke.
- Use the gradient tool to adjust the gradient angle.
Swatches
- Create custom swatches.
- Display swatches by type.
- Create swatch groups.
- Delete unused swatches.
- Use the colour theme tool to add to your swatches.
Working with Objects
- Align and Distribute objects with each other and across the page/spread.
- Use the Arrange command to change the stacking order.
- Apply Effects such as rounded corners, drop-shadows, and adjust opacity.
- Transform and rotate objects.
Working with Text
- Copy and paste text.
- Place a text file.
- Quick selection techniques.
- Display hidden characters.
- Essential character formatting, font family, style, size, leading, and language.
- Working with Adobe fonts.
- Simple paragraph formatting, alignment, indents, paragraph spacing, hyphenation.
- Run the spelling checker.
- Use find and change.
- Use GREP to find extra spaces and returns.
- Insert special characters and glyphs.
Manipulating Text Frames
- Vertically align text within a frame.
- Inset text.
- Insert column rules.
- Split a frame into multiple columns.
- Thread and unthread text frames.
Working with Images
- Create and edit graphic frames.
- Place and fit images within frames.
- Change the Display Performance.
- Work with the Links panel to update modified and fix broken links.
- Replace an existing image.
- Place multiple images.
- Apply text wrap.
- Anchor objects to text.
- Set Image import options for Photoshop and Illustrator files.
Working with Text Styles
- Apply existing paragraph and character styles.
- Edit and update styles.
- Create text styles by example and from scratch.
- Set and apply next paragraph style.
Creative Cloud Basics
- Manage Adobe Fonts in the Creative Cloud application.
- Create a Library to add reusable assets such as colours, text styles and images.
- Use Extract from image.
Parent Pages
- Understand the role of a parent page.
- Insert a page number.
- Add design elements to a parent page.
- Create a new parent page.
- Apply a parent page.
Tables
- Insert a new blank table.
- Insert a heading row.
- Add and delete columns and rows.
- Merge and split cells.
- Apply text formatting to cell contents.
- Format the table with fill and stroke options.
- Copy and paste a table from Word.
- Convert tabulated text into a table.
- Adjust table options.
New Features
- Use Text to image to create AI generated images.
- Convert a PDF file to InDesign (Beta)
Output
- Run the basic pre-flight setting.
- Package a file.
- Output to PDF
Frequently Asked Questions
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