by Joe Forbes
I’m an old dog and am thrilled when I learn a new trick. In the past few days - I learned two things that are going to save me a ton of time and would have saved me hours, if I had known about them sooner. I’ll try not to dwell on the latter though. I’m going to tell you what I learned and you might say, “Oh, I knew that.” Well, I didn’t. And that’s the point - it’s easy for us to use the same tools and trudge through the same tasks and not always keep an eye open for a faster way of doing something. I am typically mindful of when I think I can make something run more efficiently, but what this week has taught me - is that I need to look for opportunities to save time everywhere.
The first one is an Excel feature, that was previously unknown to me. My fiancé showed me a spreadsheet that she had put together for our family finances. She did something when she was in the file and the formatting changed and the data was rearranged. I had a look of dumb shock on my face, which I’m told is fairly common, and I asked her what she had done. She said she turned it into a table. The dumb look stayed on my face and I asked what that meant. She then she-splained to me that it was a way to sort and filter the data in a spreadsheet. I could not believe it. I’ve handled data in Excel for years and whenever I needed to sort data, I looped it all and went to Data - Sort. And now I can not only sort easier but filter with this new-to-me table too! That’s awesome.
Trick number two was in InDesign. A co-worker was showing me how she was setting up layers for a diecut job and did something in about a minute, that would have taken me much, much longer. Here’s what she did. She brought a graphic into an InDesign file, made a new layer, duplicated the graphic (Step and Repeat with a 0/0 offset), dragged the graphic into the 2nd layer, opened Object Layer Options - then turned off the page content and left dieline, closed that window, went to the first layer - opened Object Layer Options again and turned off dieline. Bam. Done. Before I saw this trick, I would duplicate my original art file - save a copy with the dieline and then one without and import them separately. This is so much more efficient and so much faster.
These might not seem like much to you, but they are huge to me. I’m a nerd. I love learning, I was so excited to be shown these new-to-me tricks. The mistake so many people make is thinking that you’re done. Done learning. Done discovering. That you’ve learned all you need to know, nothing could be further from the truth. I think I’ll fire up YouTube and watch some Illustrator tutorial videos at lunch.
First published on LinkedIn on February 24, 2021