Customizing Menus & Keyboard Shortcuts

New users to Adobe applications tend to spend a bit of time hunting through various menus trying to find commands they need. These tips could help.

What’s on the Menu?

You get to choose! Go to Edit > Menus… to be presented with a large dialog box. It has to be large—every menu is here: the application menus (those along the top of the screen), the panel menus (those accessed from the upper-right corner of every panel), and even the menus you get when right-clicking (“context menus”). You cannot change the menu in which a command appears, but you can decide if the command appears at all, or if its appearance is augmented with a highlight color. You should make your own “set”: when you’ve made alterations, the Set menu will read “InDesign Defaults.” Click Save to create your own so you can get back to the defaults easily if needed. Here are two example modifications:

Keys to Success

My rough count shows that there are about 440 keyboard shortcuts in InDesign when first installed. But there are about 1,100 more commands that can have shortcuts assigned to them! Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts… is where this is done.

Create a new Set, find a Product Area (usually a menu), and then highlight the command for which you’d like a shortcut. Any current shortcuts are displayed, but you can add more or replace them. You may also specify the context in which the shortcut works (e.g., only when editing text).