Power Production with GREP and Find/Change

Monday, 9:00 am – 12:00 pm

In this 3-hour workshop we will learn how InDesign’s Find/Change can become our secret weapon when importing, formatting, and cleaning up text. Using the different sections of this underused powerhouse, we will find and format text, objects, and unleash the power of GREP!

Whether you need to apply styles to poorly-formatted text you’ve imported, or make sweeping changes only to items styled a particular way, we will take a step-by-step approach to the Find/Change dialog box and investigate its many, often overlooked features. And — since no one likes to repeat the same action over and over — we’ll cover saving all of our options for future searches.

We will spend part of the class learning GREP and how it should be a vital part of any text cleanup situation. If the idea of GREP has always made you a little nervous, be nervous no more! After seeing what it can do for your text-based workflow, you’ll walk away wondering how you lived without using it for so long. It’s not as scary as it sounds and we will even play some GREP games to make it fun to use!

  • Clean up text quickly, whether it’s your own or imported into your document.
  • Learn how GREP gives you the power to locate and format text based on patterns, rather than specific text.
  • Find and change objects based on their attributes.
  • Use the existing built-in queries for common searches.
  • Learn how to save and share custom queries for easy re-use.
  • Learn tricks to auto-formatting poorly styled text you’ve imported into your document.