Meeting Notes Archive

April 5, 2007

One broken-down car…Two airplanes…Three airports…Four frantic phone calls…Five o’clock dash to the airport…and just in time for our Six o’clock meeting. That’s the short story of the April 5 InDesign User Group Meeting, or as I’ve come to know it, “Claudia and Becky’s Excellent Adventure.”

It was a cold blustery night in Rochester, but that did not deter the 48 faithful attendees of the recent InDesign User Group meeting at RIT. Arriving just in the nick of time, guest speaker Claudia McCue from Practicalia didn’t miss a beat. She hit the ground running, wowing the audience with the new features of Creative Suite 3. It was the most interactive meeting to date. The crowd challenged Claudia to push IDCS3 to its limits, and she did not disappoint.

With Claudia’s print/prepress background she was able to share some real productivity-saving tips related to InDesign with those in attendance. Issues like the use of OpenType fonts in a dual platform environment, Creative Suite 3’s lightning speed on Intel-based Macs, and much more. Some serious ooohhhs and aaahhhs were returned from the audience as Claudia shared insight into IDCS3’s new interface features, including management of the workspace through the new panels. Productivity enhancements like the ability to select and place multiple files in one motion, placing pictures into frames to fill proportionally, double-clicking a frame to toggle between the Selection and Direct Selection tools, and the new ability to place an InDesign file into an InDesign file—much like the ability we already had to place multipage PDFs. One of the biggest gasps from the audience came when Claudia shared the new Effects panel with us. We now have the ability to assign individual settings for the text, stroke, and fill of a given frame, with no need to duplicate elements. This is an incredible timesaver and a great productivity boost.

Those of us who love Illustrator’s ability to select similar fills, strokes, etc. of a given object are thrilled to know that that functionality is now part of InDesign CS3 as well, with even more options than before.

After a break, where we devoured the last of the pizza—with the help of a few hungry students—Claudia continued to bowl us over with even more new features of InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop CS3. Some advanced features of InDesign that were illustrated include the new Table and Cell Styles, improved Quick Apply feature, and powerful Find/Change dialog box that allows search and replace for text, glyphs, and objects. New to this feature is also the use of GREP (General Regular Expressions Parser) for finding complicated word and punctuation strings. The key Illustrator tools we viewed are the Eraser tool and the expansion on CS2’s “live paint” feature to CS3; “live color”—simply incredible stuff. Claudia had just enough time left to discuss a comparison of Photoshop CS3 Standard versus the extended package, then an overview of the “Suite of Options” available to us in the various Creative Suite 3 packages.

Some feedback from attendees:

“Thank you for these group meetings. Informative, interesting, and fun as usual.” 

“Great Info! Can’t wait to get my hands on CS3.”

“Loved Claudia’s presentation—good humor, willingness to try what we ask and answer questions along the way. Thanks for the pizza!” 

“Interesting, informative, and worthwhile.”

“I gathered a lot of useful tips…can’t wait to be able to work with it. A lot of things I’ve been wishing for, come to life in CS3…” 

“…The show was really great. It was a nice preview of the possibilities of InDesign CS3…great to troubleshoot issues on hand during the meeting. Great information…Claudia was a great speaker.” 

“It’s hard to believe that this meeting is free! Well worth the time.”

“…very informative and helpful!…previously decided not to buy CS3…this presenter showed new features that make it worth it to buy CS3.” 

“This was a great meeting—my first. Our speaker was easy to understand and fun to listen to!…This discussion has really motivated my interest in InDesign, so I am much more interested in purchasing.”

“Great first look at CS3. Helped me to understand what I will be using the new features for….” 

“(The meeting) was very informative and very entertaining.”

“Greatly enjoyed! Learned so much! Many thanks!”

“CS3 seems to have a lot of possibilities. I wish there was more time to go over more topics.”

“Claudia’s style is great! Humor—Honesty—Knowledge—obviously enjoys demos. Demo content and her willingness to answer questions are excellent.”

“Lots to think about. Things I learned were excellent. The drive from Buffalo, snow and all, was worth taking.”

“There’s only one thing better than a presentation by Claudia OR Noha. That’s a presentation with Claudia AND Noha!” 

Several copies of Claudia McCue’s book, Real World Print Production, were distributed to lucky raffle winners, as were other books on InDesign, a Total Training DVD, and our first full copy of Creative Suite 3.

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