More Control in My Control Panel

When I first saw the new and very improved Control panel in InDesign CS3, I was amazed at how many more settings it contains to help speed work along. Here’s a quick example. In CS2, if you’re formatting text and the Character Formatting Controls button is selected, you’ll see only Character Formatting controls. In CS3, the left side of the panel is filled with all the Character controls, but the right side of the panel also shows the most used Paragraph Formatting Controls.

I just started preparing for my first InDesign CS3 training session and noticed a major difference between the Control panel on my laptop screen as compared to the Control panel on the larger screen that I use for freelance. All of the extra controls for formatting type (and other controls in this contextual panel) were missing. What’s up with this? A different version of InDesign? No! A bug? No! Different Preferences? No! It seems that the contents of the Control panel depends on the resolution of your monitor. The higher the resolution, the more “extras” the panel contains. I increased the resolution of my laptop, problem solved!

Tip provided by Jeff Witchel, Certified Adobe® Training Provider.