From the course: InDesign 2025 Essential Training

Inserting, deleting, and moving pages - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2025 Essential Training

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Inserting, deleting, and moving pages

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- [Instructor] You can use InDesign to make anything from a one-sided business card to a book thousands of pages long. But as soon as you go beyond that one-page business card, you're going to need to learn how to manage your pages, adding pages, moving them around, deleting them, and so on. And that's what we're going to cover here. You can find some of InDesign's page features up here in the Layout panel, under the Pages submenu, but you'll find all of those features, plus more, in the Pages panel over here on the right side of the window in the dock. This is what I usually use. The Pages panel shows me little thumbnails of all the pages in my document, and if I want to go directly to the second spread, all I have to do is double-click on those little numbers underneath the spread. It takes me right there and it centers the spread in the window. But in a long document, I hate having to scroll up and down inside this panel. So I'm going to make this page's panel a little bit larger by dragging in the lower left corner. I'll make it a little bit wider. Then, I'll go up to the Pages panel menu up in the upper right corner, and I'm going to choose from the View Pages submenu, Horizontally. I just think this is a much better layout, but you can do it either way you want, vertically or horizontally. Okay, so now if I want to go to page 28, say, I can just double-click on it in the Pages panel. Now, let's add a new page to this document by clicking the New Page button down here at the bottom of the panel. When I click that, InDesign adds a new page after whatever page was selected in the Pages panel. There it is. My new blank page, a new page 29, and all the other pages shuffle so that they stay in two-page spreads. And that's because this is a facing pages document. If I want to add more than one page at a time, I can use the Insert Pages feature. You can find that back here in the Pages panel menu. Just choose Insert Pages. Here, I can type in exactly how many pages I want, let's say two, and I can tell InDesign exactly where I want to put them. For example, I'll say at the end of the document. When I click OK, I get blank pages at the end. Now, another way to get a new page in InDesign is to duplicate one of the pages that you already have. I find this very useful when I'm laying out pages quickly, because I often already have a page that looks approximately like what I want. In this case, I want a duplicate of this spread up here. So I'm going to click once on the numbers underneath that spread. Clicking twice would jump to that spread, but clicking once simply selects it. Then, I'll hold down the Option or the Alt key on my keyboard and drag that spread someplace else. You want to look for a little gray vertical bar. That tells InDesign where you want the duplicate to go. When I let go of the mouse button, you can see the duplicate appear in the Pages panel. Now, of course, the Pages panel acts kind of like a tray full of pictures. If you have a bunch of photos on a tray, you can move them around anywhere you want, right? So if I want this spread to be somewhere else, all I have to do is click on it and drag it. Again, I'm looking for that little vertical line. In this case, I'm going to put it down at the end of the document, and you can see that all the pages reflow to keep the document as facing left- and right-hand pages. Of course, sometimes you need to delete pages, and you can do that in the Pages panel too. For example, I'll select this blank page up here. I just clicked once on it, and now I'm going to hold on the Command key on the Mac, or Ctrl key on Windows, and select these other blank pages. That lets me select pages that are not next to each other. Or, if you hold on the Shift key, you can select a continuous range of pages. Now, to delete those pages, all I have to do is click on the little trash can icon at the bottom of the panel. You might see a warning that says, "Those pages include objects. Do you want to delete them?" And I can say, "Yes, yes, I do." This is looking great. You know, the more pages you have in your document, the more important it is to manage them well. So the better you know the Pages panel, the more efficient you're going to be.

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