Transcript: Produce Faster Proposals with These InDesign Scripts & Plug-ins

Hey there. Welcome to the marketers take flight podcast. I am your host, Lindsay, Diven founder of Marketers Take Flight, and the creator of the Proposal Pro course. I am obsessed with helping A/E/C marketers, just like you, put order back into the proposal process. Create winning strategies and build the confidence encouraged to advance your career.

Each week, I will be sharing tangible and tactical advice and inspiring interviews to fly through the proposal turbulence and have your career take off. So let’s dive right in.

Well hey there, marketers!  Welcome to another episode of the marketers take flight podcast, and I’m very excited today to have Julie Shaffer. This is her second appearance on the show. Today, we’re going to be talking about all things InDesign. Really some InDesign scripts and plugins and other tools, to help you work more efficiently and InDesign to make your proposal production easier and faster.  She also shares with us some great InDesign updates that came out in October of 2020 at the Adobe MAX Conference. So she’s going to give us an update about those. So without further ado here is me talking with Julie Shaffer, founder of Shaffer Creative.

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Marketers Take Flight podcast and today you are in for a real treat. We have a returning guest with us. We have Julie Shaffer with Shaffer Creative. You might remember her from episode number 12, where she talked to us all about how to streamline and speed up our proposal review processes, using some Adobe products like InDesign, Share for Review, and Adobe Review. And, if you don’t know who Julie is, go back to episode number 12 and listen to that. I call her, like, the Adobe/InDesign guru. So anytime I have a question about anything InDesign or Adobe products, I turned to Julie and I’m excited to have her again on the show. We’re recording this episode just a few weeks after the Adobe MAX 2020 conference. It was virtual so I was able to attend this year. Julie tends every year. And so she’s going to give us some updates from that as well as we’re going to kind of geek out a little bit on InDesign scripts and plugins to just make your proposal process faster. So welcome back to the show, Julie.

Thanks so much, Lindsay, I’m so excited to be back with your audience. And of course, Lindsay, you are such an asset to our industry. I love everything niche you do and how you help coordinators. So I am excited to be part of this. And I was thrilled that Adobe MAX was virtual this year. What an exciting opportunity for everyone to access it for free. Well access sessions, and I learned right off the bat that I need a new iPad and be able to use illustrator on my iPad. That was really, really cool to see.

Yeah, there were so many sessions where the presenters were using iPads and I was like, Oh, I guess I need to, I think I have an iPad One. I think that’s one of the first ones that came out.

Mine is getting old, I’m starting to not be able to update it. And I was like, well, what better reason than to do it now.

So tell us some of the other cool things that you took away from the Adobe MAX 2020 this year. Obviously, I love attending InDesign sessions and there’s some great ones as always with some great speakers and Nigel French, if you ever need to know all about typography, he had a great session on that. Art Vanderwiel is awesome. He did a session marrying Photoshop, illustrator, and InDesign, and actually for Adobe. So he just, he knows all of the ins and outs. He’s so, so great.

But one of my favorites is InDesign automation and introduction to scripts. So that’s where Dave Clayton talked about some scripts that we can use in InDesign, which segues nicely to what we’re talking about today on today’s podcast.

Yes. Yes. So, and I think I watched Dave’s, I forget the name of his session, but I did watch that one only because I knew we were going to talk about and design scripts and plugins.  So I needed to educate myself before you talked to me about them. So I did watch that session and for all of our listeners out there and the sessions that Julie recommended, plus some other InDesign related ones, I’ll put those in the show notes. And that way, like she said, the Adobe MAX conference, it was free this year. And I believe most of the sessions, at least like the breakout sessions and educational sessions will be up. I think they said a year. You definitely have some time to go back and watch those if you haven’t had a chance yet. So I’ll link up some recommendations of some of the sessions that both Julie recommends and I recommend for you the listeners in our show notes page.

Perfect.

Let’s dive right in. Okay. So everybody get ready because we’re going to geek out a little bit, but trust us, you’re going to want to listen to this what Julie’s going to share with us. So first, Julie, can you describe, or maybe explain what InDesign scripts and plugins are?

Yes. Yes. So there’s actually three things that we’re going to talk about. So. We have InDesign scripts, extensions, and plugins, and starting with scripts. They are basically little tiny programs built by Adobe or by developers that you can access through the scripts panel in InDesign. That is under windows, utilities, scripts to get to it. And there’s several other built-in, in what they’re doing is taking a series of repetitive tasks. And kind of putting them together into one little actionable script that you can run, like the little baby program. For example, my personal favorite is the place multi-page PDF. So instead of going to file place, finding your 20 page PDF form and doing them one after one, after one. You know, creating 20 pages and trying to do it, there is a great script built into InDesign, it’s been there for a long time, where it does it for you. So it just automatically places that form into your document and you are good to go.

Wow.

That is one of my favorite scripts. And we’ll talk more about some of my other favorites.

Okay.

The kind of next step up from that is extensions and you can access extensions through Adobe exchange server. And InDesign, you would go to window, find extensions on exchange,  to bring it over there. And the extensions are really like little portals into another software program or into another database or something.

Okay.

You can access an extension and really see it as a panel in InDesign to get to Istock photo or Getty images. If you’re an open asset user, there’s, there’s one for open asset available through their website. My favorite is Noun Project, which you would also get through the Noun project website that has millions of icons that you can use. Kind of cool little panels. There’s one for Pantone and finding other kinds of stock images. So lots of fun things that you can do just through extensions, which, basically give you panels in InDesign.

They kind of give you panels that access other things, and then you can just create a panel inside InDesign that you can then just like an icon or the photo just drops it in there into your file.

Exactly you have it accessible in a panel where you can just drag it in or place it in really fantastic. And if you’re like an open asset user, you can log into your account, and then you can see all of your photos. In your open asset database and you can just drag them in.

That’s awesome.

Really, really cool.

No more file place, no more control P and then finding the file and then placing it. You can use one of those panel extensions and drag it in.

And there’s, I mean, there’s all kinds of them. There’s one for like Avery labels and people don’t even look at it, but right under window, find extensions on exchange. Go, go check out some of those extensions. There, there are a lot of fun.

Yeah. Definitely going to check that out. Okay. So you talked to us a little bit about scripts. Scripts are your shortcut to repetitive behaviors, right? Is that a good way to?

Yes. Things that are taking you multiple steps to do. There’s probably a script that can do it.

Okay. And then extensions are a little bit more advanced. You can find them, there are other software that then can come into InDesign through panels. Okay. I like how you said that it was like a portal into another software,

To a website or database or something. So really one is like Getty images where you can access all of the images on Getty’s website.Great. Okay, then what’s the third one. Talk to us about the third one again.

The third one is plugins.  Plugins are much more robust and they’re like little software programs kind of attached to InDesign. So my personal favorite is called in5 downloaded that it is a paid plugin, but now I can create flipbooks, I can create little mini-website demos. Um, there’s a lot of things that you can do with plugins. So another great one is WordsFlow for our industry. That is one where we can better communicate with Words. So, if you are doing proposals and you have to collaborate with a technical team member that uses Word right now without any kind of extension, we definitely can have that as a link and we can map over our styles and we can kind of have a one-way push from Word into InDesign, but WordsFlow Pro gives us kind of a two-way communication between Word and InDesign. So that way, if you’re making edits in InDesign, They’re updating and Word through WordsFlow and kind of vice versa. So it’s a really great one as well. Now I have not played with it on InDesign 2021. Um, cause we do use just the free where you just create it as a Word link InDesign, but that’s great. One and there’s a similar one called DocsFlow if you’re a Google docs user.

Okay, similar concept just instead of Microsoft Word, it connects to Google Doc.

Exactly. Those were three kind of funny, extra areas of InDesign that we don’t talk about a lot, but my favorite really is scripts because there are so many of them.  There’s, there’s a ton that are built-in from Adobe and the last version and InDesign 2020, they launched a new community scripts area where they have some curated scripts included in your install with InDesign. But then there are thousands that you can download that do all kinds of things. Cool extension, cool way to make your proposal so much faster.

Yeah. In the scripts, you said there’s some already installed with InDesign and then the community ones, some community ones are these scripts. Some of them free. Some of them paid?

There’s some that are paid. There’s a ton of them that are free. So I have a bunch of free ones that I’ve used or not use all the time. Some of my favorite built-in ones, obviously beyond place multipage PDF. There’s one called add points. So if you draw, you know, like a rectangle, you can run a script that will add additional points on your shape so that you can alter it with your direct select tool and make more robust shapes. So that’s a fun one.I love sort paragraphs because I don’t know about you, but I used to take my text, go into Excel, sort it, and bring it back into InDesign. There’s actually a script that you can just highlight a bunch of things in sort them automatically.

So what was the name, I think that you cut out a little bit. So that one was called sort?

Sort paragraphs.

Sort paragraphs.

Yes.

That would work for like bulleted lists and stuff that needs to be sorted. Yeah. We would take those out and put them in. I would take them out and put them in Word and then sort of in Word and then bring them back in. Yeah. So sort paragraphs that one’s awesome.

Yeah, that’s a really, really, really great one. You know, you can add crop marks, you can break your frames. So that’s, there’s the built-in one called break frame, which if you have text frames, you can break those. There’s a better one in community scripts. That’s the break text thread. It does it a little bit more intelligently and gives you some more options. So I really, I use that one.

Yeah. I can definitely see a use for that, especially on some of our longer proposal document pages or sections, you know, and we just need to, you know, break it for whatever reason for some of the layout.

Yes, I do it. Especially for org charts. Because I like to automate my org charts using text frame gridify. So all the text frames are in there together. And then I put all of my content in there and as we know, or charts tend to move around, people change. I didn’t break the threads once it’s all in there. Great use for it.

Yeah. So we talked about some scripts. Do you have any other favorite scripts? It seems like you just rattle them off.

I do, I actually have some favorites for download and we’ll put these in the show notes. One of my favorites is called TitleCase. You can highlight some texts and it will intelligently put it in title case. Normally, if you try to change the case to TitleCase, You know, it makes the toos and the b’s and the ands.

Yes.

This does it intelligently. So I really like really like this script, it’s so much easier. Another favorite. These are really kind of two favorites. One is Show Based On because you know what I mean, Lindsay, I use styles like crazy and I base my styles on other styles so that I can be really efficient in how things change maybe across for the next RFQ. You can actually run a script to show how the styles and whether they’re based on that’s really nice.

Yeah.

 And say, Oh, you know what? That one isn’t supposed to be based on no paragraph style it’s supposed to be based on body. Why does a great one? And then of course there’s a script for creating Style List of Styles. So it will take all of your styles and your document and create a long list in the format of the style.

Oh, I used to do that manually.

Me too, of course. For my branding clients, I’d be like, okay, here’s your header? And I’d type out header and I’d go apply the style of header.

Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.

There’s a script for that.

So many hours that have, could have been saved and these have been out for a long time, right? These are new. This, this idea of scripts.

Oh yeah. Scripts have been around for a really long time. And some of these, I’m not sure when they were developed, but I feel like too much of my life has been spent manually doing it.

Yeah. Oh my goodness. And so like you’ll access this script, find a script and then to run it, is it just like, depending on what type of script it is, like, if it’s the Break Text Thread or the TitleCase, you just select whatever it is and then just a button that you press to run this script?

It’s a double click. Usually, you just double-click on the script or you can right-click to run it. And then some have robust ones, maybe have a dialog box once you run it to give you some options. So like that Break text thread, one in the community scripts, actually opens up a dialogue box and ask you which ones you want to break. And is it the current one and beyond, or however that works.

So it kind of guides you.

Yes.

Yeah. Okay. So these are pretty easy then once you find them and know that they’re there, which hopefully everybody now knows that, then you find the scripts, and then it’s there easy to apply them.

Very, yes, but I do want to put a word of caution out there because they’re a script and they’re taking multiple actions and putting them into one. If you don’t like what happened, it’s not a simple edit undo. Usually. It’s almost like you have to undo however many steps it was that the script automated for you.

Okay. So before you run the script, save the document.

For sure.

Yeah. And then if you run the script and you don’t like it, you can just close the document without saving and then open it back up. Yeah.

Exactly. So I know you were like the AddsPoints one. If you have a rectangle, it’s going to add four additional points. So to undo that you’d have to undo four times. If you place say 200 page PDF form, you might have to undo 200 times.

Oh my goodness. Yeah. So definitely save before you run the script, especially if you’re placing a 200 page PDF. So, yeah. Okay. I know you mentioned a couple plugins. Do you have any other favorite Plug-ins? I know you mentioned in5 and Words flow and Docs flow.

Yeah, there is another one. And I honestly haven’t played with it yet in the new version of InDesign, but there is one called Like Finds Like it’s considered a plugin, even though it kind of behaves like a script, but it’s taking what we can do in illustrator that we can’t do in InDesign. Like if I want to find all of the one point black stroked frames in my document, You can actually do that through this plugin called Like Finds Like.

Wow. I can see where that’d be useful, especially in when you have, you know, 50, a hundred-page documents and you, you know, you have a high call-out box or something on 30 of the pages, you can find something that looks like that and select them all.

Exactly. But another thing that InDesign actually built-in, in this brand new version, that’s not a plugin or a script that it helps us find stuff. Is the ability to now find color.

Yes. I saw that. Yeah. So you can, instead of just finding text or styles or objects, right. Object styles, you can find by color, is that correct?

Yes, you can look for, so we could kind of find it before, but you’d have to look for a certain text that was a color or a frame that was a color. Now you can just find the color. And it will find it even based on tints and all kinds of stuff. It’s really, really cool that we can find it and in many cases, we can replace it, but if it’s a place like logo with some Pantone spot color, we can’t really replace those, but at least. Well, we know where they are. So that’s a really great feature.

Yeah. Especially in these long proposal documents instead of having to scroll through each page and look for things.

Exactly. It’s like, why, where’s that orange? Why can’t I find it? Where is it?

That’s great. So the new InDesign is out. They released it like the day of Adobe MAX. So everybody that has a creative cloud license can go and update theirs if it hasn’t already to the 2021 Adobe InDesign. So tell us other than the FindColor, what are some of the other really cool features that you’re excited about with the Adobe update?

Well, I’m excited. Well, one, it is a new install. So when you do install it, it’s a brand new install on your machine. So it may or may not bring over some of your, your scripts that you may have downloaded a previous version. So just remember that with any new install, you just want to make sure that you grab some of those scripts that you possibly have downloaded But in InDesign 2021 was really kind of under the hood stuff. They did a lot of things to kind of speed up some things and some, some backend things. But I love obviously the FindColor and then Share for Review. We talked about that on the last podcast, but this new version of InDesign they’ve added more features. We can now have some text editing, so you can add text, mark out, text. So some of those other features that you can do through Acrobat comments, you can now do an InDesign Share for Review. And really this is the same kind of functionality that we have in the send for comments and Acrobat. But now we don’t even have to go to PDF. We go straight from InDesign, share for review, and now your reviewers can not only like circle things like they could before but now they can actually edit text, which makes it much more robust for our users. Certainly earlier in the process, when you can really get some collaboration going through, share for review.

And for those listeners who maybe haven’t listened to episode number 12, when you really explain that, if they haven’t, if you guys haven’t listened to number 12, go back and listen to that. But can you give us like the 30-second overview of what Share for Review is for those listeners who haven’t heard of it?

Yes. So what Adobe wants to do is kind of take everything else out of the mix. Where we can go straight from InDesign, share for review to anybody as long as they have a web browser. So you don’t have to have Adobe. You don’t have to know InDesign, you just have to have access to Chrome or Safari or some kind of web browser, and you can actually see the document in the browser. It’s in a secure location, you can make sure it’s by invitation only. So only people with that email can see it and then make those markups directly through your browser. So just to try it out, I tried it with my mom. She’s technologically savvy, but she’s not an Adobe user. And so I sent her a file and she opened it on our iPad and she had no problem making edits through your iPad. It was fantastic.

 And the powerful thing is, is as she’s editing it, it’s appearing in your InDesign documents

Exactly, you can see those edits as you go. So it’s, it’s really, really fantastic.

Yeah. So if you guys are listening that again, want to learn more about this? Go listen to episode number 12, because we explained it or Julie explained I did not do any explaining. Um, Julie explained all about how that works. Again, this is included too, in your InDesign creative cloud subscription, there is no more additional fee for this. Is that correct? The share for review,

That is true mean it’s, it is directly built into InDesign. You can get to it from two different places, either file share for review or at the very top right. There’s a little share icon in InDesign. So really, really easy. I’m really excited about it.

There was a couple other updates for InDesign. I know that they’re. I’ll link up the session because I watched the session of the InDesign updates from the Adobe MAX, but there was some really other cool ones too. I think I remember one he showed that was. If you had pictures on the page and you did your photos like if you manage your photos, I think through your bridge, just other photos to you, do you remember that update?

Yes. You’ve been able to find similar photos.

 Yes.

So you can do, you can place any image in right-click on it to find similar. It’s actually pushing it to Adobe stock to look through it.

Okay. That’s where it was. Yeah. I couldn’t remember where the pictures were coming from.

While we’re talking about photos, another update that they put in this version is the ability to select subject in text wrap. So before, if you had an image, like, you know, an apple that was on a white background or something, it would detect this, that it had to be kind of on a white background. Now they’ve brought some of the Adobe sensei technology directly into InDesign, where you could put, you know, I put my son and daughter a picture that I had of them in front of a bunch of trees and share this select subject and it found them and actually put a little selection around them. So if I wanted to put basically a little text wrapping Words around their photo, I could do that now directly in InDesign.

So like around their silhouette of their bodies, not necessarily around the square or the rectangle of the photo is what you mean.

Yeah.

Like the actual objects of the, of the photos.

Right. Right. And even with busy background, like a bunch of trees, it was able to detect just them.

That’s awesome.

Really cool.

Before I had to do that manually and draw. So this is fantastic.

It’s it’s using their sensei, which you mentioned, which is like their artificial intelligence, I guess our AI engine.

Yes. That they’re doing Photoshops had it for a while. So it’s nice to see. I think all the Adobe products are seeing that technology.

If you guys do watch some of the Adobe MAX session and you hear sensei, that’s what it is. That’s the engine that’s running behind for some of this intelligence. I call it like intelligent design, right? It’s yeah. Okay. Anything else about from Adobe MAX or the InDesign 2021 updates that you want to share with us?

That pretty much covers it.

Great. Okay. Again, for those of you who are listening, we’ll link all this up in the show notes. So you’ll, you’ll be able to find them and I’m going to mix up, usually at the end of every guest interview, I do these rapid-fire questions, but Julie, since you were on the show, just a couple of months ago, I’m going to mix up your rapid-fire questions. So are you, are you okay with that? Are you ready?

Okay, so question number one is what is the number one feature or skill in InDesign that you think every marketer should learn and master?

Well, that is an easy one. That is the use of styles. So if you are not using paragraph styles, character styles, and object, styles, and table. And so if you’re not using styles and InDesign, please, please, please learn them and start using them. It will make your life so much easier. Your documents will be more consistent, easier to put together, easier to edit. There are so many things that you can do just through styles

And faster, right? You just edit things faster?

In automations. you can build in so you can build. You know, every time your firm name is mentioned, it’s bold, or every time you’re missing data, you can highlight some characters. And I mean, all kinds of things that you can build in just through styles. Nested styles. So maybe your project name is bold, but your owner is in italics or something like that. All in the same paragraph, so much that you can do. And it makes it so much easier because we know in our world, we put a proposal together this week. Next week we have another one that’s really similar. So we’d go back to the one we did this week, but it’s a different font requirement, right? This one we did in Ariel the next one and now it needs to be times new Roman.

So you want to use style, so you can go into one or two places and change it and it will affect your entire document. much better way to work much more efficient. And even I had a client once; true story.. he, you know, we were about to go to print.  Big, long proposal. You know, photos and every page, he said, you know what? I really want every single photo in this document. Just a little tiny stroke, just a little bit, but just, you know, just like a half-point or something. Probably a hundred photos and the document. Luckily, I had an object style set up called photo and I went in, changed the object style and it changed all of them in the entire document and took about 20 seconds.

Wow. And that’s probably what won it. That’s probably what won it.

I’m sure it is actually.

Yeah, just joking. I’m just joking for the listeners out there. Okay. So yeah, I totally agree with styles. I don’t know how people operate in, InDesign documents without them. That’s the first thing I do, especially when I would get proposals from other firms or proposal documents or templates from other firms. And they didn’t have styles. That was the first thing I did was set up styles in the document. Cause I’m like I can’t work in a document without it. And the day that I discovered nested styles, especially with resumes. You know, you would have those paragraph blurbs of all the projects. And, but like the project, name would be bold and blue and then the rest of it would be just regular attack. The nested styles were like a game-changer for me when I found those. So that saved me so much time on resumes. So that’s my favorite style, nested styles.

If I find myself manually doing anything, then I know that there’s a better way to do it. So I’m going to build a style for it.

Yup. Yup, absolutely. Okay. Last question for today. What are you excited about now?

Well, I am now excited that we’re getting to the end of 2020.

I think everybody is.

Yes. I’m. I’m excited to get to 2021 and hopefully some new opportunities and 2021, I love to start seeing people in person again, I don’t know when that happened, but that’s really one of the things I’m most excited about, but also some other just kind of professionally, you know, we’ve been doing some fun things with InDesign and with some templates and even some custom scripts that certainly those of you that have databases when you bring in your content and just by virtue of having a database if you’re missing, you know, project name or something, you might get some weird like comma space, comma, and some kind of weird. So building custom scripts based on your needs to kind of clean those up.

Oh, exciting. Yeah. Can’t wait to hear about that.

We can just get rid of all of them. So that’s, that’s been a really fun thing for me to nerd out on lately.

Awesome. Yes. I think everybody will appreciate you nerding on those. If we could save us more and more time during our proposals with those scripts. So that’s pretty awesome. So, If our listeners want to get ahold of you, I know you provide InDesign training. What other services do you provide and how can they get ahold of you?

Thank you. And of course, check us out. Website is shaffercreative.com, @ShafferCreative on social media. We do kind of everything that falls under the MarCom Umbrella. So proposals are a big part of our work, but we also do branding and logo design, and marketing plans and communication plans. So we kind of do the entire umbrella.  We have some clients where we’re the only marketing resource. So we take care of all of that for them. And obviously, training is a big part of what we do. I’m very passionate about helping marketing coordinators do their jobs, easier and more efficiently because I really truly believe you guys have the hardest job in any firm. And I know Lindsey, you and I are on the same page on that. So that, that is really kind of what we do.

Great. Well, Julie, it’s always so much fun to talk with you. Um, and thank you again for coming on the show again, And I have this, I have a feeling that you are probably going to be on in the future to just continue telling us all about great InDesign tips.

So thanks again for coming on.

Thank you, Lindsey. I appreciate it.

 Wow. What a great interview with Julie, Julie always brings it, whether she’s on our podcast show or you’ve been to one of her training where you’ve seen her present at a conference, she always just drops so much knowledge on us. So if you need to go back and relisten to take some notes about all of the scripts and plugins and extensions, she mentioned feel free to do that.

She also put together a guide for you, of her, or a list of all of her favorite InDesign scripts, plugins, and extensions. And she has those over at Shaffercreative.com. You can find those over there and also link it up in the show notes page over at MarketersTakeFlight.com/27 for episode 27

I want to thank Julie again for coming on the show and sharing all of her knowledge with us. If you found this helpful, please hit that five-star rating and make sure you subscribe to the show. So you don’t miss any future episodes. Okay, bye. For now.