Importing Excel documents into InDesign – a date problem

 InDesign  No Responses »
May 312011
 

Recently I was training an advanced InDesign course, and one of trainees had come across a problem and asked me for advice. The problem she had come across was, whenever she imported Excel documents into InDesign, the dates switched formats.

What was happening was that the date was formatted within Excel as an english date format (say 1/12/11) but after importing into InDesign it swapped into an American date format (12/1/11). And she could not figure out why.

After a few minutes of investigation I finally figured out why. Here is a screenshot of a simple Excel table. Just a column of dates, formatted (you might think) in the English date format.  Read more...

 Posted by on May 31, 2011

Man in Space

 InDesign  No Responses »
May 292011
 

BBC’s Sky at Night magazine was recently released Man in Space for the iPad. It’s a celebration of manned spaceflight and was developed & designed using InDesign and Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite.

The app makes good use of interactive features, with a clear and well structured design and plenty of navigation tools so you never get lost. The designers have opted to use landscape orientation only so this is one app that won’t rearrange itself when you rotate your device.  Read more...

Creating interactive documents with InDesign pt5

 InDesign  No Responses »
May 162011
 

Now that you have a document loaded with interactive content such as buttons, hyperlinks, page transitions etc, you need to export to PDF before you can make use of all those features. CS5 InDesign adds a few new options for the export process.

As previously, you can go to File>Adobe PDF Presets and select an appropriate preset.

Screenshot of InDesign PDFpresets menu

InDesign PDFpresets menu

The screenshot here shows the Rich Content PDF option which is not normally visible. To enable this, navigate to: (Windows Vista and Windows 7) ProgramData\Adobe\AdobePDF, (Windows XP) Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Adobe\Adobe PDF, or (Mac OS) Library/Application Support/Adobe PDF.  Read more...

Using a Rollover Slidelet to Simulate a Rollover Effect

 Captivate  1 Response »
May 132011
 

It is always an aim of mine, when creating software simulations with Captivate, to make them as true as possible to the real application. But up until recently, I had not thought it possible to simulate mouseover effects (such as tooltips, button effects, highlighting etc.) that often occur in applications prior to clicking.  Read more...

What are epubs?

 InDesign  No Responses »
May 122011
 

This post deals with epub – what are they and how do we create them.  I have found that people tend to get confused when talking about epub – electronic publications – as, technically, any document on a computer could be considered an epub document.  So, what is epub?

Basically they are a specific type of electronic document, and we are talking about three main types here…

epub, pdfs, and rich/dynamic publications  Read more...

The Perfect Gloss

 Photoshop  No Responses »
May 042011
 

With so much of the world looking for subtlety in effects for logos and icons, it can sometimes be hard to know what is the right way to use the many exciting Photoshop filters and effects in the right way from a design perspective. The ‘Gloss’ effect is becoming an important finishing touch to many designs, especially now smart phones are driven by app icons that need to look perfect in order for it to get noticed. Developers are starting to notice why a good, finished design is essential.  Read more...