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Here's a couple of tips for hiding and showing your panels.
So, the standard keyboard shortcut to hide all your panels in all the Adobe
applications is just to press the Tab key, right.
This is standard and most people know that by now, but just to show it,
hit the Tab key, all your panels disappear. Hit the Tab key, they come back.
Now, in InDesign specifically, the Control panel is so important that you probably
want a method to hide everything but the Control panel, and there's actually
a shortcut for that as well. So, if you do Shift+Tab, that will hide basically
the right-hand side and all floating panels as well.
It keeps your Tools panel and your Control panel still visible.
Tab will bring your panels back. Shift+Tab will hide that right-hand side of
panels again. Now, there is a nice little thing that surprisingly
few people have actually discovered.
If you take a look in CS4 here, on the right-hand side of the screen, where the
panels used to be, it turns out that you don't actually have to hit the Tab key
again to bring those panels back. There is a feature that was introduced actually
in CS3 that's still in CS4 called Auto-Show Hidden panels and if you
look closely, there is this dark gray strip, and if you put your mouse there
and pause for just a second, those panels will pop back open.
And when you mouse back out of that area, the panels will auto close again.
So, it's that dark gray vertical strip there. Just mouse over to the edge of the
screen, wait for a second, they pop open. You do whatever you need to do, in the particular
panel you need to work on. Mouse out of the panel and they go away.
Now, if for some reason that's not working for you on your particular monitor
or copy of InDesign, there is a preference for that behavior, and
that may have gotten turned off at some point. Command+K, Ctrl+K on Windows.
If you take a look at the Interface section in the Preferences panel, there is
this checkbox here, Auto-Show Hidden Panels, and that's what's giving you that
pop-up behavior or that Auto-Hide behavior as well, if that's turned on.
Go ahead and click OK and again you just mouse-over, it pops open,
you mouse out, and it pops back. If you want to permanently bring them back
on again, just press the Tab key and they will stay open.
Again, Shift+Tab to hide everything except the Control panel and the Tools panel,
and that's actually my preferred method. Because now you have your panels quickly available
to you just by mousing over to the edge of the screen.
One quick note, if I hit the Tab key again, they'll bring them all back, hit the
Tab key one more time to get rid of them all. This will work for the left-hand Tools panel
as well, so if I mouse over to left-hand side and pause for a second, I'll
get the Tools panel to pop open temporarily. The reason I don't really hide all the panels
is because I don't have that same equivalent behavior to bring the Control panel
up temporarily. So, Tab to bring them all back.
Shift+Tab to get myself set up in this scenario, and then I can use the
Auto-Hide or an Auto-Show feature to pop those open and closed.
By the way, again, this works in Photoshop and Illustrator as well, so now you know,
nice, great tip for auto- hiding and showing your panels.