mundane work for you, right?

So the next time you need to add a bunch of bullets

or numbers in front of a list of paragraphs,

don't type them manually.

It's far more efficient to let InDesign add them for you.

I have my long document file open and let's press option

or alt page down to jump to the next spread.

Now I'll double click to switch to the type tool,

and I'll select a bunch of this text over here.

Now let's press command or control plus a couple of times

to zoom in on this.

To add bullets, up here in the control panel,

we want to make sure we're in paragraph formatting mode,

so I'll select that.

Then to add the automatic bullets

I'm going to come over here to the middle of the panel

and just click the add bullet button.

That's it.

The bullets get added automatically

and the bullets are all set up

with what's called a hanging indent.

See how the bullet hangs out here in the left margin

and the text flows indented to the right of it.

So now the main problems that I see

are that the bullet is hanging

really far away from the text.

And also we're using these really

dumb looking round bullets.

Everybody uses round bullets.

I want to use something with a little bit more flare.

So to change those bullets, we need to get

to the bullets dialogue box, and to get there

just hold down the option

or the alt key when you click on that button again.

By holding down the modifier key,

we get options for what our bullets are going to look like.

Up at the top, we see a number of bullet characters

that we could use.

The regular old round one, that's the one that's selected.

There's this asterisk, or a diamond,

I'm not sure who would use those.

This is kind of an interesting one,

kind of a double angle bracket.

Let's select that.

Then I'll turn on the preview check box

and move this dialog box out of the way.

You can see that that looks kind of interesting.

There's this other bullet character

inside the dialog box, which is really weird.

Looks like an A with some accents.

I have no idea what that thing is,

but I did finally figure out why it shows up for some people

and not for others.

If you're curious, go to my website

which is creativepro.com

and use the search field to look for weird bullet character.

It's kind of an interesting story.

Anyway, if you see that, you can just ignore it.

But look at all these blank boxes.

Those are for you to make your own custom bullets.

Let's try it.

I'll click on the add button.

Now, bullets are always characters from within a font,

so you need to tell InDesign which font

you want to pull the character from.

In this case, let's choose a font that has a lot

of interesting ornaments, minion pro.

I'll just type min and it guesses.

Now I'll change the font style to regular.

You can see all the different characters

that are inside that font.

So I'm just going to scroll down here a little bit

'til I see a character I like.

I like that one, this triangle shape.

Let's use that for a bullet.

I'll click okay, and you can see it shows up

here in the dialogue box where I can select it.

Now the last thing we need to do is change these

indents down here.

This is how you get that hanging indent effect.

By the way, a positive left indent

and a negative first line indent.

Let's change that first line indent to minus one P.

Obviously, you can use millimeters

or any other measurement system here.

That looks good.

So let's click okay and click out here to deselect.

See, it wasn't so hard to get cool bullets after all.

But how about automatic numbers?

Well, see up here on the control panel?

Just below the bullet button is the numbering button.

So let's go ahead and select those paragraphs again

and this time I'll click on the number button.

If you're into web design

you probably call these ordered lists.

Now, if it's a very simple list like this, you're done.

That's all you need to do

and the good news is that this will update automatically.

So for example, if you click at the end

of this paragraph here and just start typing

some other text, it all re-numbers automatically.

Now, let's say you didn't want that paragraph

to be part of the list.

It's easy to turn that number off.

Just go back up to the control panel

and click on that button again.

Now that paragraph is not being numbered,

and if you wanted this paragraph number four

to start over at number one, again,

all you need to do is click inside that paragraph

and then right click or control click

with a one button mouse,

and then choose restart numbering from the context menu.

Now you see 1, 2, 3, and then it starts over at one again.

Now, if you need to do anything more complex

with numbering than what I just showed you,

you need to visit the numbering dialogue box.

So I'm going to press command Z

or control Z a few times to get back to where I was.

Then I'll select all that text again

and this time I'm going to hold on the option or alt key

when I click on the numbering button.

The dialogue box has changed to show me features

having to do with numbering.

Now a lot of this is self-explanatory,

like you can set these numbers to be Roman numerals

or even letters.

You can even choose a character style

to apply to the numbers.

That'll change the text formatting of the numbers.

We happen to have a couple created in this document,

so I'll choose one of these styles here.

If you look closely, you can see that InDesign

applied that style to the numbers

and the dot that follows them.

That looks great.

Super simple, super quick.

Letting your computer update your bullets and numbering

is the smart way to use InDesign,

so that you can save your time

for more important design decisions.

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