If you’re new around here, I have been creating a series of short tutorials to help with some of my frequently asked questions on using Adobe InDesign.
This week, you’ll learn how override parent pages items in Adobe InDesign. Note: In 2021 Adobe changed the name of this tool from “master pages” to “parent pages” in an effort to use more inclusive language.
Watch the tutorial below for this InDesign parent page how-to. Or keep scrolling for the notes from the video tutorial, if you prefer to read along. And if you’re a fan of YouTube, click here to subscribe to my channel for more design tutorials and tips!
As a reminder, parent pages are not a part of your page count, they are like mini templates you can create and apply to pages in your document for repeated content like a background, page numbers, headers, footers, etc.
All the parent page settings are found in the Pages pane on the right side of your screen — If you’re not seeing your Pages pane, go to Window > Pages to toggle it on.
When you have content on your page that is part of your parent page, you can see that it is locked on your actual document page, you can't click on it.
If you want to make changes just to the parent page item on that page, you'll have to do what's called overriding a parent page item.
To do this, you can hold down CMD + SHIFT if you're on a Mac (Control + Shift if you're on a PC) as you click the item you want to override. This will now unlock it and make it editable.
But note here: doing this disconnects it from the parent page, so this text box is now part of my regular page content, it's no longer connected to the parent page and won't automatically update with any changes made on that parent page.
If I go back to my parent page and make changes to the text box, then come back to my document page, you can see those changes didn't transfer this time, that's because it's been disconnected with an override.
To reverse it, and re-apply your parent page content (which overrides the item you just unlocked — overrides the override, if you will!), you can drag and drop your parent page thumbnail to your document page thumbnail, and it's reconnected back to the parent page.
Want to learn more about InDesign? Check this out 👇
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