I recently came across the need to print out a spec sheet of paragraph style settings from INDD. We're working with an outside vendor who is programming a proposal builder platform for our business development team. Basically, my design team created branded layout templates in INDD. We gave the vendor our native files, but their programmers need a written spec sheet of all the paragraph style attributes. From the paragraph style palette, when you go into each style, you can see the style settings, but you can't copy that text, nor export the settings as a spec sheet. I doubt this feature will be in high demand, but wanted to share this use case with you, and see if this would be a viable feature.

Not sure if this suggestion lives under styles. What I'm thinking InDesign needs is a feature like Illustrators symbol library where we can take a group of pre styled objects and define them so that they can be easily dragged back on to the page rather than continually copying and pasting from other parts of a document on to then overtype or swap out images etc. as you build documents consisting of replicable structured content.

Functionality would need to be like Illustrator, a simple drag and drop interface on to a panel. So that any images, shapes, text frames, styles. colours etc are captured into one grouped object that can then later be recalled at will. Ideally through hot-key activation.

Then the link can be 'broken' to it's source so that it can be updated with new content.

If someone doesn’t want to have to type the words 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑘 𝑦𝑜𝑢 over and over, they simply click 𝐄𝐝𝐢𝐭 > 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐬 > 𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐨𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐭 > 𝐀𝐝𝐝:

𝐌𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝: ty
𝐂𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: thank you

That is the typical way users do it. If Adobe can make a new panel called 𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐒𝐭𝐲𝐥𝐞𝐬 that would be helpful. It would function almost like 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐒𝐭𝐲𝐥𝐞𝐬 but be it’s own separate entity:
1. Select the words 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑘 𝑦𝑜𝑢 with your 𝐜𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐨𝐫 (or you can select as many words as you want)
2. Click 𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐒𝐭𝐲𝐥𝐞𝐬
3. Then, click 𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐬𝐭𝐲𝐥𝐞
4. 𝐒𝐭𝐲𝐥𝐞 𝐍𝐚𝐦𝐞: Compliments
5. 𝐋𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐠𝐞: English
6. 𝐀𝐛𝐛𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐋𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬: ty
7. Click 𝐎𝐊

It is constantly frustrating that every year Adobe fails to update InDesign with external Style functionality.

It should be easy to define a set of Paragraph Styles and apply that as "Global Style" which can then be used
across multiple InDesign files. Updating a "Global Style" would then apply those Style changes to all affected documents.

This should apply to all things that can have styles applied, Table, Object, Paragraph, Character, etc. Any of these different styles should be able to be saved to an External Global Style — that can be then saved externally locally — or saved to the Cloud and applied that way.

Currently this is not really possible and it's deeply annoying. I should be able to easily create a style that can be applied to any document I wish, and have any adjustments I make to that style automatically apply to all documents using it.

Obviously there could be a simple dialog box that prompts when opening a document using a global Style that has been updated. The user is then given a choice to update the document so that it is in-sync with the style updates, or create a new style from the previous state, or keep all the current settings and not update the documentand keep the older style settings without overriding them with the new updates from the external Style.

COME ON ADOBE. IT IS 2020.
GLOBAL STYLES. Without them updating documents in the same sort of style language is a massive pain, because any evolutions or changes to a style in one document immediately makes all other documents out of sync — this is a very common use-case problem deisgner run into, and the fix to it is very strightforward.

Ideas for expanding the functionality of text variables have already appeared here. It would also be interesting to create variables to describe the properties of non-text objects. For example, color, font size, size (length / width), page position, styles, etc.

The benefit of such an introduction is obvious: you do not need to create many monotonous styles that differ only in one or two common features. It would also indirectly affect the number of master spreads created.

Each property of a certain object represented by a list (for example, color) can be expanded with variables of the corresponding types (color type variable).

By assigning the value of such a variable once, the user will save considerable time both on the development of the layout and on the correction of possible hidden errors.