Reno InDesign User GroupMeeting Summary
InDesign High-Impact Publishing
Tue, Apr 22nd, 2008 at 6:30 PM
University of Nevada Reno
Event Details
We had a good turnout, with several first-time attendees for our April 22nd meeting in the Frandsen Humanities Building on the UNR campus. Many institutions are continuing to discover that an InDesign workflow is not only for their traditional publications, but is also becoming a necessity for all their communication and marketing documents.
In our first demonstration segment, where we used InDesign to evaluate and format a spreadsheet, we discovered that we now have another valuable utility to assist us in streamlining our publication efforts. Even more interesting is InDesign’s ability to (optionally) maintain a live “link” to the spreadsheet, and allow us to refresh our layout with the latest data, without repeating tedious formatting procedures.
Continually through the evening, we reinforced the need to create a “set” of hard-working stylesheets. We touched on the different types of style-sheet panels that InDesign places at our disposal to produce (and more important, re-produce) a professional presentation of our content. For example, we touched on the powerful relationships between Cell Styles and Table Styles, coupled with the more-familiar Paragraph and Character styles.
Jim Cooper, our User Group chairperson, demonstrated how new users can immediately capitalize on the powerful features of InDesign. In another example, he showed a practical application of Anchored Objects, which would potentially save many hours of formatting and layout time for catalogs, yearbooks, directories, or instruction manuals.
We then jumped into a group-led Q&A on the creation of Styles and formatting tables. In addition, we explored ways to “move” styles and objects between documents, and use InDesign snippets to share our best effects with others.
The last part of our meeting was devoted to long documents. We reviewed procedures for adding files to an InDesign Book, auto-numbering and arranging documents, creating an index and TOC, synchronizing stylesheet definitions, and exporting to PDF with some interactive features.
The evening ended with raffle prizes, most notably a copy of InDesign CS3.
The meeting evaluations indicated that the content and presentation were quite useful. Thank YouContinued thanks to the University of Nevada, Reno for their hospitality. Thanks also to Apsiva, Peachpit Press, and O'Reilly for their kind donations. Comments from the evaluation sheets"I learned more in two hours than I did in two years of daily InDesign use. The demonstrations were directly related to my industry." Next MeetingWe are looking forward to the Reno InDesign User Group Summer Series, to be held mid-day on campus. Expect a regular meeting announcement soon. |
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