Customer Reviews

Adobe InDesign CS5 [OLD VERSION]

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I am a scientist, not a graphics professional. I used InDesign for the first time as version CS3 and was impressed; I successfully made several nice posters without too much effort. Now that I am writing two books for which I am creating many illustrations in Illustrator, I thought InDesign would be perfect for page layout. It certainly has the capabilities. My goal was to import a roughly 40-page chapter from MS Word 2010 and then add 13 figures with figure captions and two text boxes. I struggled for roughly 3 days, during which I watched numerous how-to videos and read a lot of instructions, before I got completely bogged down. For example, because InDesign is capable of advanced tasks like creating dynamic figure captions, I spent a lot of time trying to get it to automatically number figure captions. The process was painful and ultimately unsuccessful. I gave up, and on a whim tried MS Publisher 2010. What I couldn't accomplish after at least three days of effort using InDesign I was able to accomplish in less than 3 hours in Publisher. I don't know yet whether Publisher will be able to pull together all of my chapters and create a TOC and index like InDesign can, but since I couldn't even finish a chapter using InDesign, it's ability to work with multiple chapters is useless to me. And the interface for working with books in InDesign is a joke: it's a tiny panel; if you choose "Create new book" on the splash panel, you won't even know InDesign created a book, because the tiny panel is obscured by the splash panel. InDesign's interface is bland, and all of the icons and text are tiny and can't be made larger. Combine that with having to wade through a lot of jargon in the user manuals (typography jargon is especially annoying), and trying to learn and use InDesign CS5 proved to be painful, and required intense concentration and dedication. Yes, Adobe spent a lot of time producing helpful user manuals and how-to videos, but perhaps their time would be better spent making an easier to use product than trying to provide help for a hard to use program. In summary, InDesign CS5 is absolutely no fun to use, so if you can accomplish your page layout tasks with a simpler program like MS Publisher 2010, don't use it.

Remember 20 years ago when Word never did what you wanted it to do, and you had to save your document 20x in a 30 minute span because it always crashed. Welcome to the modern version of InDesign.

Drains your time: what I think will take 10 minutes ends up taking 30-40 minutes
Not intuitive: half of the basic functions are hiding
Search function is not user friendly
Language: they invented a new gibberish language
Icons/pictures: don't alway complete the function you request it to

If you purchase this software, I would highly recommend taking an in-person day+ training class. You will not understand how to operate it by using the tutorial videos and search function alone.