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Let's move up and talk about the mothership of all panes and that's the Control pane. I am going to click on my black arrow. I will be calling it the black arrow a lot in this series but it is actually called the Selection Tool. It's just easier to learn if you associate with the black arrow. So we are going to move up here and look at the Control pane. You make call it the Measurements palette because we have called it that for years in QuarkXPress. But if you go up under Window and look for Measurements, it's not there. It's the Control pane. Take your black arrow and click on the Type right here at the top of your document and you will notice that the Control pane comes alive.

So you are going to feel at home with a lot of these choices because it's familiar territory. X and Y coordinate, Width and Height, percentage of enlargement, rotation, we have been here before. This isn't new to InDesign, Quark had got this but what is new is what you see over here on the right side of the Control pane. If you are converting from an earlier version of Quark, there is nothing like this at all. Later versions of Quark started adding more and more to the Measurements palette, so we have got some familiar territory here.

We are now going to explore every button. What I want you to learn is what I have been saying before and that is if you put your cursor over one of these icons that you don't know what it is, a little tip will pop-up and it will show you flip vertical, flip horizontal, rotate, the W is Width. Pretty simple. Now if you are paid by the hour and you want to change the width, you may want to put your cursor in there.

Let's say, I want to change this to 53p. I am going to Backspace and make that 3. Yeah, we could do that or let's say it's 52p6. Delete 2 and let's put our cursor here. Delete 6. If you are on salary, if you are on deadline, you may want to just click on the W and that will highlight everything in that window. That's the same with all of these tools. As you will click through, you will see, as you click on the icon to the left of the window, you will see that it highlights in blue everything in the window and you can just type on your keyboard and change the numbers.

Just like QuarkXPress, if you change tools, I am going to go the Type Tool and click in the Type, you will notice that now our Control pane has changed to all type-specific choices. There are so many options available to us in the Control pane, all the way to the left, you will see there is an A and a paragraph symbol. If you click on the paragraph symbol, it is paragraph-specific items.

Over here they have given us a few character choices, but the bulk of this is paragraph related. Click on the Character icon there or the A and you will see it's character-specific with a few paragraph choices off to the right. So the Control pane is dynamic and it changes depending on what you are working on. Let's go back to our black arrow. So what they have done? If you look in the top here, you will notice that with this box selected, we have got the choice of adding a stroke to that box.

So basically what you have got in this little area is a mini Stroke palette. Let's go look at the Stroke palette and compare. You will see that the Stroke palette has a lot more options than what we have available to us up here. So what you have got is a small version of the Stroke palette where you can choose the Width and you can choose the Type of stroke but that's it. You want more options, you still need the Stroke pane down here. I will recess that.

Just like all the other panes I showed you, the Control pane has a fly-out menu. This is really important because they put a lot of choices in here that are consolidated from many of the panes versus going to individual panes. Let me give you an example. If I put my cursor in the Type and I am on my Character or Paragraph mode of the Control pane, if I go to the fly-out menu, you will see I have Paragraph Rules, for example. But I also have No Break and Underline options, down here Bullets and Numbering, Hyphenation.

Well these choices actually reside in two or three individual panes but because we are using the Control panes fly-out menu, we have one source for many choices versus hunting down these selections in a bunch of individual panes.

Let's move up and talk about the mothership of all panes and that's the Control pane. I am going to click on my black arrow. I will be calling it the black arrow a lot in this series but it is actually called the Selection Tool. It's just easier to... click to read more