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Adobe InDesign CS3 Classroom in a Book

Your shortcut to mastering InDesign.

Armed with some essential keyboard shortcuts, you can harness the power of Adobe InDesign more quickly and efficiently than you can by using just a mouse. This guide covers InDesign’s keyboard shortcuts and tips, including:

How to create your own custom keyboard shortcuts
How to modify InDesign’s built-in keyboard shortcuts
All the built-in keyboard shortcuts for InDesign CS3 and earlier versions

Keyboard Shortcuts Basics

A keyboard shortcut is a keystroke or a combination of two or three keystrokes that you can use to execute a command in a computer program far more quickly than you could by clicking with a mouse. This guide includes all of the built-in keyboard shortcuts for Adobe InDesign® CS3. Almost all of these shortcuts also work in InDesign CS2, though not as many will work in earlier versions of InDesign, such as CS or 2.0.

How to Customize InDesign’s Shortcuts

In addition to providing hundreds of built-in keyboard shortcuts, InDesign lets you create new custom shortcuts or modify existing shortcuts.

Click on Edit in the main toolbar to open the Edit drop-down menu.
Click on Keyboard Shortcuts.
In the dialog box that appears, click on the New Set button near the top-right corner. A second dialog box will appear.
In the second dialog box, type in a name for your new set of shortcuts, choose Default in the drop-down menu next to the words Based on Set. This will create a duplicate set of InDesign’s built-in shortcuts that you can modify without overwriting the Default set.
You’ll return to the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog box, which will now display the commands in your new set.
Click on the arrow to the right of the drop-down menu next to the words “Product Area.” This drop-down lets you select from 19 categories of shortcuts, such as Tools, File Menu, and Edit Menu.
Once you select a Product Area, a complete list of its commands will appear in the white box in the center of the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog box.
Click on the command that you’d like to modify. If the command already has a built-in keyboard shortcut, its shortcut will appear in the Current Shortcut box. For instance, if you select the “Edit Menu” Product Area and click on the Copy command, the shortcut Ctrl+C will appear in the Current Shortcut box.
If the command that you’d like to modify has a built-in shortcut, you can delete the shortcut or change it.
1. To delete it: Click on the shortcut in Current Shortcut, click on the Remove button, and click OK.
2. To change it: Click on the shortcut in Current Shortcut and then click on the empty New Shortcut box. Type in the new shortcut key combination you’d like to use for the command—InDesign will prompt you if the key combination you want to use for your new shortcut is already being used for another shortcut. Once you’ve entered a unique key combination, click on the drop-down menu under the word Context and choose Default. When finished, click Assign and then click OK.
If a command doesn’t have a shortcut listed in the Current Shortcut box, you can create a new one by clicking on the command and following the instructions above for changing an existing shortcut.
To make changes to more than one shortcut, make all your changes first, and only then click OK in the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog box.

From now on, InDesign will load your custom set of shortcuts when you start InDesign. To use the default set instead, click on Keyboard Shortcuts in the Edit menu and choose Default in the drop-down menu next to the word Set.