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Now, I'm going to close the swatches panel but open the pages panel because everything we have done so far is on a single page. However, in real world publishing you will probably also be dealing with pasting pages or spreads like in a newspaper or magazine. So, here in the pages palette, let's click the new button two more times. So, here we have a single page and here we have a spread. So, with that in mind, let's go to the view menu and choose Entire Pasteboard. And we'll close up that pages panel.

Now, the reason I want to do this is I want to show there are actually different kinds of guides. So, we talked about dragging a guide down from the ruler and you can see here the data piece just to that page or if I drag over to the right, just to that page. But what if I want to ruler guide that expands both sides of the spread, all you have to do is press the control key or command on the Mac and that will cause that ruler guide to expand both sides of the spread. When I let go of the control key or the command key, it will drop that ruler guide down on just one side. So, I can have guides on just one side or the other or pressing control on windows or command on the Mac will make that guide expand both sides.

Now, another way to do this is click in the ruler, drag down and instead of dragging over the page here, I will actually drag outside in the pasteboard.

Now, there is something very different about how guides working InDesign compared to most other applications. That is that InDesign really considers them objects. What I mean is if I click and drag around this page, it's convenient that there's no other content right now. But as I click and drag, I'm actually selecting all of those ruler guides. That means I can do some pretty interesting things with them. For example, let's open the layers panel, click the new button down here at the bottom or you press the Alt key on windows or the option key on the Mac. And we'll create a new layer and we'll call it guides.

Now, let's come back here and make sure we do have a guide selecting. Oh no! I have to admit I confuse myself for a minute there. None of the guides are selecting. Do you know why? Well, let's go to the view menu, choose grids and guides and the guides are locked. Okay. So, that would be helpful. Let's unlock those guides just incase you make the same mistakes that I did.
Now, I'll select those guides. They're all selected. Now, when I go to the layers panel, you can see this little icon right here. That indicates that those are the selected items. Now, when I take those selected guides and drag them up to the guides' layer, they actually move from the layer one up to the guides' layer. And the visual queue here is that the color actually changes to match the color of the layer that they're on. Now, because guides are actually considered objects in InDesign, we also have some interesting options including the ability to distribute and align all of our guides. So, we have these four guides selected. I'll choose the "distribute vertical centers" option and you'll see those all spread out evenly which might be really convenient just to set things up in your layout.

Now, with all of those guides still selected, let's copy them so Control-C on windows or Command-C on the Mac. And those guides are now on the clipboard. So, if we press Control-N on windows or Command-N on the Mac to make a new document, go ahead and select the default document preset and click Ok. Now, we'll press Control-V or Command-V on the Mac. And those same guides will be dropped down on the page at the same increments. So, guides are much more flexible here inside of InDesign allowing us to really treat them as objects and use them in other situations. So, if you set something up that you really like in one document, you can easily copy and paste them in the other documents and share them with other folks that you work with.

So, let's close this document, control-W on windows or Command-W on the Mac. And we don't need to save it. So, I'm going to click of here in the pasteboard to deselect all of t

Now, I'm going to close the swatches panel but open the pages panel because everything we have done so far is on a single page. However, in real world publishing you will probably also be dealing with pasting pages or spreads like in a newspaper or magazine. So, here in... click to read more