Once you have opened a design template in InDesign, it is helpful to first get an overview of the contents of the design. This will make editing much easier for you:

• Use the shortcut Ctrl+0 or Cmd+0 to see the entire design of a page in a work window.
• Use the shortcut W to switch quickly and easily between normal view and preview mode.
• In the layers control panel (Window>Layers), you can see which layers you can access for editing. We often divide these into a group with text layers, on which all text elements are located, and a group with design layers, on which the design elements are located. Expand the groups to see which layers are available. If required, you can also show and hide individual elements.

• All images that are linked to the document are listed in the control panel for links (Window>Links). You may also be interested in the information under the link information to check to what extent the images you inserted during editing are printable. You can display this and other helpful information by selecting the context menu of the control panel in the top right-hand corner, clicking on Control panel options ... and generally displaying the corresponding parameters.
• In the control panel for color fields (Window>Color fields) you can see which colors have been used for the design. By making changes to the color fields, you change the respective color globally in the entire document.
• The paragraph formats are extremely important for working with the text fields available in the design. Open the corresponding control panel via Window>Paragraph styles to find out which paragraph styles have been used for the design. We explain how to work with them here. Please note that character formats created for text formatting also appear in our design templates.
• The page control panel also plays an important role, especially for multi-page documents. Here you can add or remove pages and edit master pages.

These control panels are helpful for targeted editing of the templates

To summarize, you should keep the following control panels in mind when editing InDesign templates to get an overview. All control panels can be accessed via the Window menu item in the main navigation bar:

• Layers
• Links
• Color fields
• Paragraph formats
• Pages