Help with paragraph/character styles

[Charlie329572228uvx]

Hi,

I am trying to rebuild my resume using ID because I understand it will allow me to have more control and consistency of formatting, provided I know how to do it. The rather basic format I am creating is shown below:

There are three primary features I need to capture. 

1) Section Headings - basic all-caps 

2) Item Entry - including nested style with bold position title and right-tab date range

3) Item Description - to be a bulleted list

I am not really sure what needs to be defined as a character style and what needs to be defined as a paragraph style. As you can see I have started to define some paragraph styles but I quickly realized I'm not even sure of the correct way to "build" multiple types of styles together descending down the page. Should I be hitting shift-enter after entering the Section Heading? And then selecting a different paragraph style for the item entry? Then selecting shift-enter and selecting the correct paragraph style for item description?

Thanks.

[BobLevine]

Learning InDesign to simply do your resume is not even close to an efficient use of your time. Make sure the content is good and do it in Word. Most resumes are read by machines and the preferred format by many companies is Word. 

By the time a human sees your resume, you've pretty much gotten past the hardest part to getting an interview.

[Willi Adelberger]

1. A paragraph style must be used.
2. A system of styles is made depending from based on the other. If you change the root style, all others, where it was not detachedfrom its root paragraph, is inherited to their childs.
3. Character Styles are used only for exceptions for single words or letters inside a paragraph style, but never for the whole paragraph.
4. I see, you use for each paragraph a separate text frame. No, don't do that. A single text frame on the page for the content is enough! Space between paragraphs is doine with space before and after and other paragraph style properties.
5. Avoid multiple returns or line breaks to create space between.

[Charlie329572228uvx]

Thank you for this info.

[Barb Binder]

Hi @Charlie329572228uvx:

First, your questions:

1. Paragraph styles are used to format entire paragraphs. Do everything you can with paragraph styles first, then add character styles to differentiate/highlight words within the paragraphs. Character styles can be assigned manually or called into the paragraph styles as nested (or GREP) styles.
2. Press Enter/Return to signal the end of a paragraph. Shift+Enter/Return starts a new line but not a new paragraph. Use line breaks sparingly—if at all—when you don't like how a word is wrapping at the end of a line. There are usually better ways to control the word breaks. 

That said, I'm with Bob. If you are applying to large organizations, just use Word, and keep it simple. The machine-readers even get stuck with Word docs that are too complex.

~Barb

[Charlie329572228uvx]

This point about the machine readers makes sense. Thank you for the recommendations @BobLevine