Recent Files pane usability problems.
The Recents Pane has serious problems for InDesign Book users. There are two main problems:
- Not enough Recent files are listed.
The limited number of recent files results in ONE project taking over ALL the recent files every time you make an adjustment to the book, because EVERY CHAPTER becomes a recent file. In my books, there are often more chapters than allowed in Recents, so it's not even useful as a way to access chapters (which obviously is best done with the Book panel).
- There is no way to manage Recents.
Realistically, there is NO reason one would want to see all chapters in Recents just because a renumbering task was completed. It would be a nuisance, but after repaginating a Book, I would then immediately delete ALL the chapters listed in Recents. Of course, there are other files that might be opened briefly for trivial reasons, and which need not take up space in Recents.
Conclusion: The Recents facility is so lacking in usability features that it is more of an annoying distraction than anything helpful for accessing or managing work files.
I have discussed these problems before, but the FUNCTION of Recents doesn't seem to be of much interest to the UX people. Instead of allowing me to MANAGE the Recents, they come up with cute slogans to occupy valuable screen real estate. Why? Who wants to see "Create a Style" every session?
Most of InDesign is spectacularly functional. This cosmetic Recents concept is surprisingly useless and out of place for anyone who isn't a beginner.
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Anonymous
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I wish InDesign would CONSOLIDATE all the Recent Files suggestions. There is so much overlap, but individual postings have only a few votes. The Recent panel is so devoid of important, obvious features. We need to MANAGE recent files, sort by date or project or client, honor the file system so files can be organized, handle more than a few dozen files, group by key-words, etc.
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Anonymous
commented
I should have given this a more descriptive title: Recent Files Are Removed by Book Operations
I'll post a very concise FR on this. I hope the redundancy is OK, since I'm sure others find their workflow hindered by this behavior.
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Anonymous
commented
It's unfortunate that although everyone I discuss the Recent Files design with agrees -- it's not very useful, and especially useless if you use the BOOKS facilities -- none of them has the time to find this particular FR and vote or comment on it.
Every time I start InDesign, I'm looking at a full list of recent files, but almost ALL of them are just chapters in a book. In that book, I made ONE change that altered the page breaks in an early chapter, so ALL the chapters were opened automatically and their page numbers were updated. So now every chapter is a Recent File! This is beyond useless -- it destroys any usefulness the Recents panel might have to offer.
Please fix this. The Recents facility could be SO useful, but as it is I can't get any value out of it in any of the CC apps.