Perfect Your Pages Panel in Adobe InDesign

Descriptive prefixes and color labels can make it a lot easier to tell pages apart in a long document. By default, InDesign displays thumbnail images of each page in the Pages panel. But that's not always the most useful option for telling one page from another, especially in a document with a lot of pages that share a similar design.

You can turn off thumbnails in the Panel Options dialog box inside the Pages panel fly out menu. When thumbnails are turned off, each document page is shown with its master page prefix in the center. You can put up to four characters here, so don't be shy. Descriptive prefixes make it easier to navigate a long InDesign document.

To take it one step further, you can also add color labels that appear under pages in the Pages panel. To apply color labels, select one or more pages in the Pages panel, right click and choose Page Attributes > Color Label, then select the color of your choice. You can also set color labels on master pages and automatically have document pages display the color label of their masters.