Participant

Question

How do I select multiple selection boxes at once, not one at a time.

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
January 22, 2025
4 replies
1153 views

So I feel like this should be simple and easy to do, but I can't figure out how to do it, or how to search it. The little boxes to the right of a layer in both indesign and illustrator, they are called selection boxes. In order to do most actions you need to have that selected on a layer, not the layer itself. However, I can't find a way to quickly select the selection boxes of multiple layers at once. If I want to select five layers, I click the top one, hold down shift then click the bottom. Can;t do that with selection boxes. If you make a group in indesign, and select the group's selection box, it won't select every layers' selection box. That means if i have a page and want all the items on the page in a layer, i can't just select all the text without individually clicking on every. single. one. I'm making a rule book, there will be upwards of 40+ items on each page. How do I select ten layers' selection boxes quickly? I feel like im going insane. This should be an easy simple thing to do. What if i want to batch edit all the text, or change the color of all the borders, etc. do i have to select every layer I want to change individually every single time? I'm about to scream because this would take so long to test color schemes or layout or fonts.

How to

Barb Binder

Community Expert

Hi @beccah70096095 , and welcome to the InDesign Community Forum.

You are correct that we can't click, shift click the colored dots for a contiguous selection, but we can click, shift click the object names, right click that selection > Select item(s). That seems to be what you are looking for.

A second option is to drag across objects to select them—not everyone knows that, either.

Please understand, I'm in alignment with this group's suggestion to use styles. You can create object styles for the frames and then edit the stroke on all of them, even across pages. You can also nest paragraph styles in object styles so that they are assigned automatically, and again, you can edit the paragraph style across all the frames using that style.

This is advanced stuff. Should you work towards it? Yes. But if you are on deadline, maybe my first suggestion will get you back on track and then you can come back and learn more about styles when you have some downtime. In the long run, they are by far the better approach.

~Barb

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

Willi Adelberger

Community Expert

Work with styles (object, paragraph, character, …) yancheng change those, if you want to change multiple instances.

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

@beccah70096095

Why do you have to select them?

As @Peter Spier suggested - can't you use ObjectStyles?

Or you want to move or scale them or do something that isn't ObjectStyle's property?

If you work on a PC - ~~probably~~ even free version of my ID-Tasker tool ~~could help you~~ would definitely help.

beccah70096095Author

Participant

What's that? I want to batch change font or stroke outline of text box

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

What's that? I want to batch change font or stroke outline of text box

By @beccah70096095

Here are some screenshots.

Raw structure of the objects in the document:

This will show ALL objects in the whole document, that contain word "PHOTO" in the Label:

As above - but word "FRAME":

As above - but "PHOTO as the exact content of the Label:

More refined Task:

selects all objects on the Active Page - it's the page that is in the center of the screen in the InDesign (important), or you can specify page,
loads info about those objects,
then filters out objects that don't have "PHOTO" in the label - hides everything else,
marks as selected all items on the bottom list - Browser part,
selects in InDesign all objects that are selected on the list.

As I've said - this can be done with free version of ID-Tasker.

BatchMode isn't available in the free version - so if you want to modify your objects - you need to switch to InDesign and set properties you want - objects are already selected so you don't have to do any extra clicking.

Full version would let you process ALL objects in the WHOLE document - no matter what page.

Of course you can also filter by Layer, applied ObjStyle, X/Y location, size, etc. - also available in the free version.

You would've to do labeling of the objects - which can also be automated as an initial step.

Unless there is something else unique about the objects you want to select - then adding labels wouldn't be necessary.

Peter Spier

Community Expert

This is a case, I think, where theuse of styles, both Object Styles and Paragraph and Character styles would be very important for doin the types of edits you are describing. Edit the styles, not the indidvidual objects.

beccah70096095Author

Participant

I'm just learning about styles. I'm used to photoshop. But to change styles I'd still have to select each text box individually and change the style, right?

Peter Spier

Community Expert

I'm just learning about styles. I'm used to photoshop. But to change styles I'd still have to select each text box individually and change the style, right?

By @beccah70096095

No, that's the point of styles. You can select the style, edit it, and all of the places in the document where that style was used will automatically update to the edited definition.

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