How to add color

[christophery76280259]

I have a white document. I can not add color to it for the life of me. I searched on google, read many things, none work. There is nothing anywhere to do and the color and swatches and gradient are white with a red line through it.

Never will ever understand why I can never just open this program, make something and be done with it. Everything thing is just a complex complicated chore.

MS paint can easily add color but not indesign.

[christophery76280259]

Sorry I forgot to mention yes I am build a dresser from ikea without reading the instructions, so yeah go ahead and make fun of me.

[christophery76280259]

I am literally following these directions to the T

Apply colors to objects in an Adobe InDesign document

Does not work. What am I doing wrong?

[christophery76280259 · Accepted solution]

Seriously? A billion dollar company and I had to make a box around it? Wow! That takes the cake. Not one document or resource anywhere said I need to make a box around a blank page that i want a different color other than white. I seen dumbness in my life but that utterly takes the cake, draw a box around your brand new completely blank document, instead of just adding color to it or being offer the choice of a non white paper, i a poor man and look at that million dollar idea a billion dollar company could not come up with. Adobe sucks. No wonder it is the virus capital of the world.

[Steve Werner]

No one ever claimed that InDesign was a program for beginners. It's a full professional program like Photoshop is for working with images. People need to take a classroom or a video course or more to get full use of all of its power. (If you were on a Mac, you could use Pages which is designed for beginners. I'm there are simpler programs for Windows users too.)

Short answer: Choose the Rectangle tool from the Tools panel (looks like a rectangle). Set the fill color (on the Swatches or Control panel) to pick the color background you want to use. Drag out the Rectangle tool in the area where you want a colored background. If necessary, choose Object > Arrange > Send to Back to send the rectangle to the lowest level of the stacking order below (behind) other objects like text frames.

[Steve Werner]

I've marked your non-answer an NOT correct, and I'm locking this thread. You obviously need find a simpler program you can use.