From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Overriding parent page items - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Overriding parent page items

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- [Instructor] As I mentioned in the last movie, InDesign protects parent page items when you're on a document page. You can't move them, you can't delete them, you can't even select them. Now, I've opened this document from my exercise files folder. It's the file called Long Doc version B, and this starts up where we left off in the last movie. So you can see that I already have my running footers or headers or whatever you want to call them. Anyway, I want to zoom in on this text frame. In an earlier chapter, I mentioned how you can use the zoom tool to zoom in, but I'm going to use a keyboard shortcut. I'm going to hold on the Command key and the space bar on the Mac or Control + Space bar on Windows. That gives me the temporary zoom tool. On the Mac, you might see this spotlight window appear, but you can just ignore that. Now I simply click and drag. Drag into the right zooms in, and to the left, zooms out. Oh, I should point out that on some computers, this zoom trick works slightly differently for technical reasons. The computer I'm using has a high-resolution monitor, but if your computer does not have a high DPI monitor and a fast graphics card, then you may just have to drag out a rectangle, and then when you let go of the mouse button, it'll zoom in. Anyway, now I can see this frame better at the bottom of the page, and if you look really closely, you'll know that it's a parent page item, or what some people call a master page item, because it has a dotted line for a frame edge. So if I try and click on this with a selection tool, nothing happens. I can't edit it, I can't move it, nothing. Now, I hear you saying, but I thought InDesign was all about letting me express my creativity. What if I want to change it? Well, you can. You just need to know the trick. And the trick is you have to hold down two modifier keys on your keyboard, Command + Shift on the Mac, or Control + Shift on Windows. And when you hold those modifier keys down and then click, InDesign overrides that object. It pulls it off the parent page and the frame becomes a document page item. You can see that because there's no longer a dotted line around it. It becomes a real selectable object that I can move, I can edit it, I can do anything I want with it. Now I'm going to zoom out with Command + Option + zero, or Control + Alt + zero so I can see the entire spread, and I'm going to do the same thing to that footer on the right side, Command + Shift or Control + Shift click. That overrides it. Now I'll just press the delete key on my keyboard and, poof, they're gone. But what if I didn't mean to delete them? What if that was a mistake? Don't panic. You can always get parent page items back, and the way you do that is to look inside the pages panel. First, make sure you have the proper pages selected, the ones that you want to affect. In this case, I have pages eight and nine selected. Those are highlighted. Then, I'll go to the pages panel menu, and I'm going to go down to the parent pages sub menu. Inside there, I'll choose remove all local overrides. It's kind of a double negative there. You're removing the overrides that you already made. In other words, you're putting back everything that was on the parent page, setting it back to the way it was originally. So that's good. When it comes to building structured documents such as books and magazines, parent pages are a necessity for an efficient workflow, and controlling each parent page item is key to making sure that your final document ends up just the way you wanted it.

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