From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Saving and reverting documents - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Saving and reverting documents

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- [Instructor] Once you have a new document open or you're editing an already existing document, you should save it to disk. For example, I'll select this text frame over here and I'll just drag it over here, move it into position. Now, whenever you make a change to a document, InDesign adds a small asterisk in the document tab, right up here next to the document name. That's good to notice. So let's save this file. I'll go to the File menu, and you can see that there are three different options in here to save, Save, Save As, and Save a Copy. Let me talk for a moment about what the differences are between these three. Save and Save As are pretty obvious, they work pretty much the same as any other software. But Save As does have one feature you should watch for. Of course, InDesign lets me specify where I want to save the file, I'll put it here on the Desktop, and it lets me rename it. I'll put a 2 at the end. But here's the different part, the Format popup menu. This gives you an option of what format to save the file in, an InDesign document, an InDesign template, or this mysterious file format called InDesign CS4 or later, otherwise known as IDML. Now, IDML is good if you want to send the file to someone with a really old copy of InDesign, especially if they're using InDesign CS6 or something like that. But watch out, because using IDML to save backward to an earlier version is not always seamless, some things can get lost. Obviously, the choice called InDesign document is just a regular InDesign file, nothing special about it. A template, however, is slightly different. Files saved as InDesign templates always open as untitled. The idea being that you're using it as a base to build future documents. In this case, I'm just going to save it as a regular InDesign document. You'll notice that the document name changed up here in the document tab. Now, that third option in the File menu, Save a Copy, is kind of interesting. It means save the current state of this document out to my hard drive, but let me continue working on the document that I have open. For example, I'm working on that version 2 of the file, that's the one I just did a Save As on, but I'll choose Save a Copy, and I'm going to save this one out with a different name. I'll call it basecamp1. Then, I'll click Save. But take a look at the document title up here, it still says I'm on version 2. Now, I call these saving base camps, because it's like climbing a mountain, you set base camps every so often that you can always return to. I could make all kinds of additional changes to this document and even save, but if I want to, I could go back to that base camp version that I've saved off. That's just one of my favorite things about InDesign, this ability to experiment and never feel like anything I've done is set in stone. Now, another way you can feel confident in experimenting on your pages is that there are an unlimited number of undos. Like I could go ahead and start making all kinds of crazy changes to this document, really mess it up, but I know that I can always undo what I've done by pressing Cmd + Z or Ctrl + Z on Windows. Or I could go to the Edit menu and choose undo here. You can also redo your changes by choosing it from the Edit menu or pressing Cmd + Shift + Z or Ctrl + Shift + Z on windows. Now, sometimes, you really mess up a document and you don't want to undo 100 times in a row. In those cases, you might consider using something else from the File menu. You can choose Revert. Revert means go all the way back to where the document was when you last saved it. Look, mistakes happen, they're inevitable. So teach yourself to save, save often, save base camps, save backups, and then use undo and revert judiciously when you need to.

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