That’s just silly and unproductive.

Simply hit F6 or open the InDesign Info Panel manually by visiting the menubar Window>Info. Now all you need to do is click in any text box with the Text Tool active and take a look at the Info Panel.

As you can see in the image above, you’ll be shown the character, word, line, and paragraph count in the selected text box.  In the image, I have a text box selected that contains 882 characters. The Info Panel tells me that I have 629 of those characters showing, and 253 more that are hidden because I reduced the size of the text box and the text is overset. If the text box were not reduced and all the characters showing, the Info Panel would simply say 882 characters.

Activate a Layer Set, go to the pop-out arrow in the upper right corner of the Layers panel, and drag down to Merge Group—or hit Command + E. This will REPLACE the Layer Group that combines all the Layers from the Group into one Layer.

But sometimes I want to get a merged version of a Group to work with and maintain the Group with its component layers intact.

To do this, select the original Layer Group and hit Command + Option + E. This will merge the Group into a NEW Layer above the existing Layer Group rather than replacing it.

Why would you want to do this? Perhaps you want to blur the entire Layer Group to make it appear as though it’s in the background, but still keep all the Layers editable just in case you want to adjust and re-blur later.

To quickly switch to the text tool in Adobe InDesign when you are working with the Select or Direct Select tools (the arrow tools), simply double click the text box.

As an added bonus, the cursor will appear wherever you double clicked in the text box. Click three times in rapid succession and it will select the word directly under where your cursor triple-clicked.

Of course, if you just want to switch to the text tool to create a new Text Frame when you have an arrow tool active, just hit the T key.

A quick way to access them is to hit Command + B with the frame selected. But a quicker way is to Option + Double Click with either of the Selection tools active.

To select a color located anywhere on your screen(s) while remaining in Photoshop, simply select the Eyedropper tool, hold down the mouse key while you move around the screen until you’re over the color you want to grab – then just let go of the mouse button.

As you can see in the screenshot above, I’ve grabbed a shade of red from my desktop wallpaper without leaving Photoshop. Quite handy!

They Keyboard & Emoji Viewer is available in the Mac’s menubar after you enable it in the System > Keyboard Preferences dialog window.

But there’s a shortcut to bring that Keyboard Viewer up without visiting the menubar—a good amount of time savings if you use it a lot or have the menubar icons hidden with an app like Bartender.

Bring the Keyboard & Emoji Viewer up simply by hitting Control+Command+Space.

The one thing that bothers me is that there’s no keyboard shortcut to make it go away. You can’t hit Command+W to close the Viewer window because the Keyboard Viewer isn’t a typical app in that the app window is never the “active” window, and you can’t force it to be.

Rather than clicking multiple layer view icons (the little Eye next to the layer preview and name), you can speed up the process by Option+Clicking the one layer view icon you want to view.

The other layers will turn off. To turn them all back on, Option+Click the layer view icon again.

When you have an object container that is much larger than the content it holds (such as the top text box in the image above), simply select it with either the Selection or Direct Selection tool (solid or empty arrow tool) and double-click any of the CORNER HANDLES of the object frame. The frame will automatically resize to be just large enough to fit the contents (lower text box in the image above).

Bonus:
I’ve emphasized corner handles above, because if you double-click the top-middle or bottom-middle handles, you’ll resize the object container’s height only. And as you may have now guessed, if you double-click the frame’s side handles, you’ll resize the object container’s width only.

I published this tip back in 2012, but it wasn’t obvious in the original article that it works on text frames as well as image frames—plus, it’s such a simple and useful tip that I thought it was worth repeating.

With no documents open, simply double-click an empty space in the Application Frame (the space normally taken up by a document window. The catch of course, is that you have to have the Application Frame active and no document open.

This is a tip I posted back in 2012, but it’s a great shortcut so I thought I might repost it.

With the object(s) you want to adjust selected, click in the Transparency panel’s amount input box and use the following keyboard shortcuts:

• Increase/Decrease Transparency by 1% = Up or Down Arrow Keys
• Increase/Decrease Transparency by 2% = Option + Up or Down Arrow Key
• Increase/Decrease Transparency by 10% = Shift + Up or Down Arrow Key