The pages panel

InDesign has a wide range of panels that let you edit and style your portfolio. Knowing how to use the Pages panel is key for organising and navigating your InDesign documents. In this tutorial, we’ll familiarise ourselves with the Pages panel and learn what a Parent page is and how to use them.

Locate the pages panel

Make sure you have the Pages panel open by navigating to the menu Window → Pages and drag it to the right-hand side of the user interface.

Two halves of the pages panel

The Pages panel is split into two parts — the upper half shows your Parent pages (which are like templates for other pages) and the lower half shows all of the pages in your document. You can double click on a page to navigate to it.

Edit a Parent page

If you make an edit to a Parent page it will be applied to all of the pages in your document that have that Parent applied. By default, all pages in this document have the ‘A-Parent’ applied. To edit the contents of a Parent page:

In the upper half of the pages panel, double click on one of your Parent pages.
Make any changes to the Parent page that you want to.
When you’re done, double click on one of your document pages to exit the Parent page.

Renaming a Parent page

Right-click the A-Parent page
Select Parent Options for “A-Parent” (your parent page might have a different name.
Change the page prefix or page name as desired.
Click OK to apply.

Apply a parent page

To apply a parent page to a single page in your portfolio:

Single click the parent page from the upper half of the pages panel.
Click and drag the parent page onto the target page (the page you want to apply it to).

To apply a parent page to multiple pages in your portfolio:

Hold Shift and click to select range of target pages.
Right click the selection.
Select Apply Parent to Pages...
Select the parent page you wish to apply.
Click OK.

Reorder pages in your document

You can easily reorder pages in your portfolio document by navigating to the lower half of the pages panel:

Select the page you want to move.
To move a range of pages, select on page and hold Shift and select another page to select all pages in between.
Click and drag your selected page(s) to their new location in your document.