If you haven't tapped into the nested styles feature of Adobe InDesign, you're in for a treat. Nested styles combine paragraph and character formatting into a single sophisticated style that can be applied at the click of a mouse.

A key factor in setting a nested style is choosing what character or text element will trigger the various formats. For example, you can tell InDesign to start with bold text then, when it encounters a period, switch to plain. After one sentence, change the style to italic.

One of the advantages of Adobe InDesign's membership in the Adobe Creative Suite is its interoperability with other Adobe applications. That means you can drag and drop native Photoshop and Illustrator files directly into InDesign while maintaining all their attributes and editability.

But InDesign goes even further by allowing you to drag as many files as you like from the desktop and drop them into InDesign. That's not all: You can also place text from Microsoft Word by simply dragging it from an open document into InDesign.

Rulers and guides are essential for positioning objects with precision in your page-layout program. Anyone who uses QuarkXPress, PageMaker or InDesign is familiar with basic ruler operations like changing units of measurement, resetting the zero point, or dragging guides onto pages.

But there's more to rulers and guides than picas and inches. Adobe InDesign offers many ways you can leverage rulers and guides when designing a page layout or creating a document template. For instance you can color code guides, use guides on layers, and save them in libraries.

The comparison between InDesign and Illustrator has often been noted. "If you're familiar with Illustrator, you can use InDesign" goes the common wisdom. But if you're not an Illustrator user, you may not be aware of InDesign's hidden power. One such timesaving feature is the ability to replace color swatches in a gradient fill.