Adobe InDesign Work Area, Tools, Palettes

You can get access to all of the functions of InDesign through the Menu Bar. However you will see that, as you become more proficient and faster at using InDesign, you will want to learn shortcuts so you don't have to drag your mouse around in search of the option you want. I won't go over the shortcuts as there are different sets of them. If you used to be a Quark user, such as in my case, you can choose to use QuarkXPress' shortcuts instead of the InDesign native shortcuts. Ok, now that I got into this I will tell you how to do it: go to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts and under Set, choose Shortcuts for QuarkXPress. You can even make your own custom shortcuts, but we won't get into that. You can do that at a party should the conversation suddenly swerve towards InDesign shortcuts...

If you want to learn the shortcuts, just look next to the command you are interested in and you will see the shortcut if there is one.

If you want to open a new document go to File > New > Document, and, when the New Document window shows up, choose your document size and press OK.

View Larger Image of InDesign Menu Bar