The other day I was working in my copy of InDesign at home when it dawned on me that none of my pallets were in the same location as in my copy of InDesign at work. I decided to look into how I could set this up easily without having to reset all the pallets by hand. In this post I have decided to cover what a “workspace” is and how I used it to solve my issue.

When we work in our programs many people find that there are things that we like to have certain ways. For some of us, our pallets are a perfect example. We like to have certain ones in certain areas of the screen or in a certain order on the left slide out area in InDesign CS. Adobe included a way for us to save this set up so when we need them we can have the program automatically set that way. Saving a specific set up is known as setting a “workspace.”

Once you have everything where you want, you can save this “workspace” by going to Window  Workspace. Here you will see a “Save Workspace” option and once it is selected you will name the workspace. This name will appear in a list above the “default” option under Window –> Workspace. To select a specific “workspace”, you just click on the name.

Workspaces are great when you work on different tasks and like having your screen set up differently for different tasks. My coworker is a perfect example of someone who enjoys the benefit of workspaces. She has two specific workspaces that she uses. One is for her everyday work and the other is for the work on a Prepress Manual. She found that she was looking for different pallets when she worked on the manual compared to the ones that she used on a daily basis in her regular work. The ability to save that workspace, made it so she would have those specific pallets at her fingertips when she was working on the manual and then be able to go back to her normal set up when she was working other work.

The way I was able to use workspaces to solve my issue was to do a search of my computer for the name that I gave my workspace and see if there was a specific file. To my delight there was. So I copied that file and then placed it in the specific folder on my home computer so it would show up under my list of workspaces.

To find your workspace files you go to the main hard drive (usually “C”) and then:

“Documents and Settings” –> “*your name*” (this could be “user” if you just log into XP as the default user) –> ”Application Data” (hidden folder need to be shown to see this folder) –> “Adobe” –> ”InDesign” –> ”Version 3” –> ”Workspaces”

Here you will find other workspaces if you have them and this is where you copy the file for the workspace that you want to be available. Then you go back to InDesign and look under “Window” –> “Workspaces” and you should now see your new workspace in the list above the default option.

Bookmarking:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 11th, 2005 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Tips & Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.