Meeting Notes Archive

September 20, 2007

Our guest speaker for the evening was Michael Murphy, host and creator of the video podcast, “The Indesigner.” Michael’s presentation about “Styles Equal Substance” & “Advanced Find/Change with GREP” was AWESOME!

In the first part of the evening, Michael explained how styles in the last few versions of InDesign have expanded far beyond text formatting to become, arguably, the heart of the application. He demonstrated how Styles are both inter-connected and inter-dependent; they control, improve and influence many other features, some of which rely entirely on styles to work at all. In this comprehensive session, Michael explored the breadth and depth of styles throughout InDesign CS2 and CS3, from the smallest settings to the most complex relationships between styles, to features as varied as Find/Change, Text Variables, Tables of Contents, and Anchored Objects. Michael proved how much substance there is to styles!

Michael’s second session on “Search using GREP expressions” was as intriguing and informative as his first. Starting with a brief look at some hidden Find/Change features in CS2, Michael leaped into GREP and demonstrated its benefits in finding alphanumeric strings and patterns in a short story, a long document, or in many open documents. Michael used real-world examples to drive home the message that with GREP you can transform your text and workflow, and forever change how you think about manipulating text.

Download Michael’s presentation handouts HERE. In the Grep handouts, there’s a link to the XML file that you can download, install in your InDesign CS3 Query folder, and then experiment with.

Grep Searching: Standardizing phone numbers
A handout from Michael Murphy
Download [PDF: 156 KB]  

Style relationships throughout InDesign
A handout from Michael Murphy
Download [PDF: 243 KB]  

More resources on Adobe.com
For detailed information on constructing GREP expressions, see:
www.adobe.com/go/learn_id_grep

Comments from the evaluation sheets

“Excellent presentation! Very informative, great presenter, very organized material and on-screen presentation. I will definitely use some of these features.”

“The amount of info given was a amazing! Can’t wait to checkout the podcasts!”

“Great content, nice presentation, very useful information. Helped demystify GREP – gotta go play!”

“GREP - WOW!! Can’t think of how I can use it now but it’s good to know it’s there. STYLES – I can never get enough info on styles.”

“How could you say anything but WOW!”

“Excellent, thorough in depth content that can be applied daily. I can not wait to get back to my studio to apply what I learned.”

“It was a very information-packed and interesting seminar. I’m very glad I didn’t miss this one!! I’m now more motivated to dive in and really try to utilize the style features!”

“Valuable information! This will save me hours of time in formatting! Thank you”

“Excellent presentation. A lot of ground covered.”

“Extremely informative. My head was spinning with the possibilities and the power of CS3.”

“Probably the best user group meeting I’ve been to in the years I’ve been going to these. I like technical-type presentations.”

“Very informative. Not enough time to go into detail. So much to learn.”

“Outstanding Speaker!”

“Excellent! This was the best meeting I’ve been to about InDesign. Loved the thoroughness for advanced users. Great speed of topic coverage.”

“Very informative. Michael did a great job translating technical info into accessible language.”

“Best presentation I’ve seen. Well rehearsed!”

“Very helpful and inspiring. Michael made GREP something I might have a possibility of understanding. Made me realize how many more things I could be using styles for.”

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