Adobe InDesign: Go Ahead and Quick, Apply Yourself

Adobe InDesign sports a nifty Quick Apply utility that will make quick work out of such mundane tasks as finding and applying styles, menu commands, scripts, and variables-almost anything that can be accessed with your keyboard.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had to wade through a long list of styles before finding the one I needed. Now all I have to know is the name of the style or other InDesign feature I want to use and let the Quick Apply list do most of the work for me.

Here’s how Quick Apply Works

Let’s say you want to create a new InDesign document and you cannot remember the command is available via File > New Document. All you can remember is you want a file.

1. Access the Quick Apply list by either clicking the Quick Apply button located at the upper right of the InDesign window or press [control] [enter]
2. Start typing the name of the command you would like to access. For instance, instead of choosing File > New > Document to display the New Document dialog box, you can type Fi to display File menu commands in the Quick Apply list
3. Press the down arrow key on your keyboard a few times to highlight File Menu:New > Document in the Quick Apply list
4. Press [enter] and Bam! The New Document dialog box appears.

Okay, maybe that’s too much work for you to display the New Document dialog box. Who am I to argue? But how about this?

Quick Apply a Style

Let’s say you have a style in your document called Headlines. Here’s how the Quick Apply button will help you get your work done faster, without having to remember the keyboard shortcut for applying the Headlines style (if there was a shortcut assigned to the style). Using this technique, you don’t even have to know where the Paragraph Styles panel is–you only have to know that the Headlines style exists in the document.

1. Using the Type Tool, click in a paragraph that you’d like to format with the Headlines style
2. Press  [control] [enter] to display the Quick Apply list
3. Type Hea for Headlines

   Hey look, the Headlines style is in the list

4. I’d press Enter and then, Bam, Bam! You’ve got style! Headlines, that is.

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