Margins and Columns VS Document Properties...

Yes, even an excellent software like InDesign can continue to be polished. 

I think that a software should somehow educate a new user on its design philosophy and purpose and origins. In the case of InDesign, it is rooted in the making of books and magazines and controlling many pages. Controlling a consistency and sameness is important to long documents and publications. InDesign philosophically assumes you drew something free-form in some other software (Illustrator) and then placed it onto a page in InDesign in preparation of printing or some other form of digital publishing.

One of the reasons I rarely use the Properties panel is that it tries to be the quik-mart of most things you commonly need, but leaves out the deeper things. Hence, it often dissatisfies me.

I have taught many students about the Document Setup dialog for early on setup decisions; versus the File > Document Setup along with Layout > Margins and Columns when you realize you have to re-rig a document. Even while teaching it, I have always wondered why margins and columns are not also available in File > Document Setup. That always seemed unnecessarily confusing to me.

The longer I work at this art, the more I appreciate underlying grids, margins, columns, baselines... And also increasingly I appreciate the artistic balance of height to width ratios for all graphics. 

Has anyone read "Leonardo da Vinci" by Walter Isaacson?

@hughc46560181

Do you have just text - in one thread / Story - or are there graphic elements that are not Anchored in the text?

Thanks for replies All.

I now understand that Margins and Columns is 'always activated' in as much as when I create a new document I can either leave the value for columns as 1 (the default) or enter any other value up to 216.

And for a document like the one I've inherited where the previous editor was using Margins and Columns, I can change the number of columns to 1 and this way I'll no longer see columns.

My issue is with the way InDesign presents multiple ways to edit margins but without a clear/consistent/visible hierarchy in terms of which methods for editing margins override other methods for editing margins.

If I create a new document I can use Properties>Document>Margins to edit page margins across the whole document. But (as above) once I've used the Layout>Margins and Columns dialogue to edit margins/columns, values shown by Properties>Document>Margins are no longer accurate and changing these values no longer has any effect. 

In my view this is very poor UX.

And - if there isn't one - there should be a way to deactivate Margins and Columns

Hi @hughc46560181 , The column guide count is a page property—Document Setup just sets the document page default. You can easily set all of the page column guides to 1 via scripting. Something like this:

app.documents[0].pages.everyItem().properties = {marginPreferences:{columnCount:1}}

Does this:

After run:

I get what you are saying, but I wish for that because of the huge number of producers who use only Illustrator for the production of entire magazines. It starts with the crowd who said: "I only know Illustrator, so I will make all projects and publications in the software I am familiar with."

Relative to this general discussion, I wish Illustrator had margins and columns!

As I understand it, once Margins and Columns has been 'activated' in an InDesign doc, this overrides values for margins entered in Document Setup, 

By @hughc46560181

Actually, this is the same as circling back to File > Document Setup as when you set these up initially in the New Document dialog box.

Well, we all have our work methods, and not all documents necessarily need a margins-and-columns structure, but this feature is pretty much the #2 bedrock feature (after Page size) in ID and most layout programs for a reason. But no, there is no method of "deactivating" the feature/concept, not as such.

Assuming you have enough overall experience to ask this and make good use of the alternate approach, I'd just point out that setting your Parent Page to zero margins, one column, no primary text frame essentially removes the idea of margins and columns from the layout model.

You can set the Margins to 0 and the Columns to 1. Done that way, you will not see the Margins and Columns. But these two things, Margins and Columns, are fundamental to the use of InDesign (this isn't Illustrator!). Why not embrace them? It opens up the cleverness of other features when done the right way.