Now, when you are working in the InDesign and you have all of your palettes available like this, there are also some handy shortcuts you should bear in mind. If you hit the tab key on the keyboard on its own, you will see that all of the palettes disappear. This is a very quick and easy way to remove all of the clutter from around the outside and just focus on the item that you are working on at this point.

You hit the tab key again, everything will come back. Now, the tab key is very handy because it does hide all of the palettes but its down side is it hides all of palettes including the control palette here at the top and the tools palette on the left. The tool that you are most likely to use on a regular basis.

So, if you hold down the shift key and hit tab instead that get rids of all of the palettes apart from this two. Likewise, shift tab brings them back again.

Now, another one that is quite fun as well is if you hold down the control and Alt or command and option on the MAC and hit the tab key, it will open up all the palettes that have been slid of the side of the screen, same shortcut will slide them off again. This is a very quick way to access all of those and then collapse them of the side of the screen.

Now, if you are using the tab key and you are trying to hide all of these palettes and show them again, there is an exception to this rule. Let us say I am on the type tool and I have accessed may be on the character options here, one of these settings such as type size at the top.

If I am to hit the tab key now, it is actually going to go as you can see through all of those options in the control palette one by one allowing me to select them. Tab key in this case is not hiding all of those palettes. So if you are inside a text, you are inside a dialog box. This whole shortcut is taking out of action.

So do make sure you are back in your main selection tool. You do not have any dialog box selected in the tab key, it will work just fine.