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same reasons you’d want to disable some menus—a cleaner display, the aforementioned smaller
RAM footprint, and to limit workstation installs to only what is required of the user’s workflow.
If your team works in a strictly print workflow, for instance, and never exports to HTML or Flash,
you can remove commands, panels, and everything else to do with hyperlinks, rollover buttons,
sound and video, HTML export, and so on. I can tell you from personal experience that using
Extensions Manager to disable things like the Tools panel (Tool Box.apln) on someone else’s
computer is also an amusing practical joke. Just be kind enough to let the victim in on the joke
before too long (or leave this book nearby opened to this page and I’ll take the blame).
Workspaces
Now that you have InDesign customized to your personal work habits, with this panel stacked
over here, another dozen panels collapsed to icons in a dock, three more stacked, and several pan-
els hidden, menus color-coded and customized, and keyboard shortcuts totally customized, it’s
time to scare you: Everything you just did will evaporate the first time InDesign’s preferences get
corrupted. They get corrupted often—no more so than other applications’, but that’s too often.
All your customizations are saved into the application preferences, a flimsy little ASCII text
file with all the resiliency and tensile strength of wet newsprint. Sneezing too hard in the gen-
eral direction of your computer could tear and corrupt the preferences. Then where would you
be? That’s right, trying to remember all the original keyboard shortcuts while stumbling all but
blind through the original configuration of panels. Of course, there’s a solution to prevent the
loss of your customizations. And, I’ll explain that solution in detail in the sequel to this book,
Mastering InDesign CS5 for Print Design and Production Rebooted, due out from Sybex next year.
Don’t let your preferences get corrupted before then.
Just kidding. I was doing an impression of a typical local news anchor—Tune into our six
o’clock broadcast to find out what’s killing area children and could be killing your child right now! (Yup,
tune in at least three hours after your child has been presumably slain to learn that children are
being given two desserts in the school cafeteria on Fridays.)
InDesign has, for several versions now, had the ability to save panel (previously palette, lest
we forget the tragedies of yesterday) arrangements as workspaces. Workspaces are so much more,
though: They save menu customizations, keyboard shortcuts, and panel arrangements. It’s the
last part that’s the most important because, while you can save and restore sets of keyboard
shortcuts and menus, workspaces are the only way to record panel arrangements.
When we looked at menu color-coding a few pages ago, the New in CS5 option you chose
from Window  Workspaces was a workspace. You may have noticed that loading it also rear-
ranged your panels. If you missed that, load up New in CS5 again from Window  Workspaces.
Note the dock on the right wherein several panels have been hidden and replaced by others not
shown after first installing InDesign. The Essential workspace will return everything—short-
cuts, menus, panels—to out-of-the-box InDesign.
Anytime you customize InDesign, save your workspace by choosing Window  Workspaces 
Save Workspace. Supply a name, and your workspace will be added to the Workspaces menu
ready for instant restoration in the event of a Preferences corruption and subsequent reset or if you
change things around to fit a particular project.
That brings me to another key point: You can have many, many workspaces. Sometimes you
need these five panels showing, some projects require those six others, and yet other types of proj-
ects require a dozen or more, all with options showing. Make workspaces for each of your typical
types of projects. Strictly print projects, for instance, aren’t likely to need the Hyperlinks panel,
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