Meeting Notes Archive

December 7, 2006

"Navigate Your NuLOOQ in Style."

The Dallas chapter kicked off its second meeting at the Southwest Pilot's Association. A special thanks to Liz Parks & Jana Nix for working with the user group to provide a location for our meeting. They were also instrumental in keeping your chapter leader organized throughout the evening. It was good to see that membership rose from our initial meeting. I encourage all registered members to take an opportunity to come out and join us for the bi-monthly meetings. Group benefits and networking will only improve in 2007.

Our topics for the evening included Customizing & Navigating InDesign as well as Working with Styles. As your chapter leader, I presented the evening's topics. In retrospect, one topic would have been enough. Members had an opportunity to see the Logitech NuLOOQ Tooldial in action. This handy device is the perfect compliment to a mouse, and for anyone who shuns using keyboard shortcuts (you know you're out there). The NuLOOQ works with the entire CS2 suite and can be configured for other applications. Member Les O`Riley was quick to point out that the NuLOOQ currently has less functionality for Windows users. New drivers will hopefully be released by Logitech in the near future. Everyone who attended received an InDesign keyboard shortcut list printed from the Media Cats website. Some key things mentioned about customizing & navigating:

1. Palette position & palette options are saved as Workspaces. These are universal and will be available no matter what document is opened or created.
2. Preferences are saved with each document, e.g., a brochure defaults to Times font, a memo defaults to Arial, but all new documents use Georgia as the font. To set Master Preferences for InDesign, change the preferences without any documents open. After setting your Master Preferences be sure to exit InDesign so they are saved.
3. Take advantage of the Story Editor when proofing text. The Story Editor will show threaded text frames as one linear page. This beats zooming in & out while jumping pages.
4. You can customize your own keyboard shortcuts in InDesign. You can print your shortcut list or show the available commands that can be assigned a keyboard shortcut.

After a late break, our second topic of the night was Working with Styles. A brief explanation of styles was given for new users, and they learned that style formatting is more efficient in terms of editing your document. The presentation focused on more advanced style features including Object Styles, Nested Styles, working the Next Style feature and using applying styles quickly. Some key things mentioned about styles:

1. You can use the Eyedropper Tool or Quick Apply to apply styles quickly throughout your document.
2. If your document has information arranged in a repeating sequence, Apply Next Style can speed up formatting.
3. When using Nested Styles without a specific sequence of text you can insert the “End Nested Style” control character from the Type menu. (Thanks to Gene McCullagh for relaying this tip)
4. Object styles can include Paragraph or Character styles. This can be combined with the Apply Next Style feature for quicker formatting.

We ended the meeting with another round of great giveaways. Two NuLOOQ Tooldials and four 1GB USB drives were offered as prizes by Media Cats, Inc. and Lisa Forrester, our Adobe sponsor, presented one lucky member with a copy of InDesign CS2. Feedback received from the meeting was great and as your chapter leader I am hoping to incorporate the suggestions provided by those in attendance.

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