What are styles shortcuts in indesign

All styles—paragraph, character, table, cell, and object—may be assigned to keyboard shortcuts on the General pane of their options dialogs. To set a keyboard shortcut, click in the Shortcut field and press the keyboard keys that will serve the particular style—for instance, Cmd+5/Ctrl+5. Assigning keyboard shortcuts to styles is not a new feature; neither is the fact that it’s so limited as to be almost useless.
The primary limitation to style shortcuts, you see, is that they require use of the numeric keypad— the set of number keys out to the right of full-sized keyboards. Every shortcut must be one or more modifier keys—Cmd, Opt, Ctrl, Shift on Mac or Ctrl, Alt, Shift on Windows—plus a numeric keypad number. Thus, the first limitation is that usually alphabetically named styles must be bound to arbitrary numbers. (Did I put the RunIn Head paragraph style on Ctrl+Shift+Num 5, Ctrl+Num 5, or was it something plus the 6?) Next, you have to recognize that, on most keyboards, any of these options are two-handed keyboard shortcuts, which are only—and not always—slightly more convenient than reaching for the mouse and clicking an entry on a panel. The choice of shortcuts is also limited by the fact that many key combinations are reserved for use by the operating system. On Windows, for example, you cannot use Alt and a number without also choosing Shift or Ctrl because Alt plus the numeric keypad numbers is reserved for system-wide insertion of special characters—for example, to insert a copyright symbol, press Alt+0169. Finally, the biggest limitation to keyboard shortcuts for styles is again the numeric keypad. Laptops don’t have them, nor do many slim desktop keyboards. Most laptop keyboards have a pseudo-numeric keypad created by depressing the Function key (often labeled as Fn and unique to laptops) and then pressing other keys (such as U, I, and O for 4, 5, and 6 or another mapping of numeric keypad functions to existing keys). So, in addition to pressing one, two, or three modifier keys and a number key, those using laptops or slim keyboards must press Function. Worse, pressing Function often changes the function of a modifier key. Option on a Mac PowerBook, for instance, becomes Alt when the Function key is depressed. Therefore, it is impossible to press Opt+Shift+Num 6 on a PowerBook’s built-in keyboard.
Until Adobe adds styles to the customize Keyboard Shortcuts dialog and opens up the rest of the keyboard to style shortcuts, the feature is more of a hindrance than a help. The only exception I would proffer is default styles. Leave your custom styles unassigned to shortcuts, but binding the Basic Paragraph paragraph style, the None character style, and similar defaults for table, cell, and object styles to shortcuts can be very useful and universal because every document you create has these defaults (though you may not use them). For instance, some people find it very helpful to put Basic Paragraph on the numeric keypad’s 1 key, the None character style on 2, and so on. For the rest of their styles they use something far more efficient: Quick Apply.

Working Efficiently with Objects

Working efficiently with objects also entails employing reusable styles but goes beyond to reusable objects as well.
Object Styles
Let’s review: InDesign operates on a container-to-content model where everything in the document is either content—text, images, paths—or a container to hold content. Text, for instance, must be contained in either a text frame or a path text object. In addition to container and content, InDesign also cares about attributes. Thus, InDesign deals with containers and content and with the attributes of each. Paragraph and character styles govern text content formatting attributes but not the attributes of the frame containing the text. Paragraph styles, for instance, have no bearing on the number of columns in the text frame or the transparency of text. That and much more is left to the dominion of object styles, which record and apply the attributes of containers. If you open the Object Styles panel from the Window menu, you’ll find three preloaded entries—None, Basic Graphics Frame, and Basic Text Frame (see Figure A). Each style is listed in brackets denoting that it is undeletable; you can edit these styles and change their definitions, but you can’t get rid of them. The None style you want because it wipes out pretty much every attribute—fill, stroke, effects, everything. Basic Graphics Frame and Basic Text Frame reduce a selected object to default options; for a graphics frame, for example, that means 1 pt black stroke, no fill, nothing else. One extremely useful option is the ability to set a user-created object style as the default for newly created graphics or text frames. Remember, a graphic frame is not only one into which you’ll place imagery; it’s also any unfilled decorative path such as a block of color, an ellipse, and so on. On the Object Styles panel flyout menu, choose any existing object style from the Default Graphic Frame Style submenu to format every new graphic frame as you draw it, which is an even faster and more efficient method of styling multiple objects than drawing and then applying the style. The Default Text Frame Style offers the same choice for text frames. The rest of the panel is remarkably similar to the other four Styles panels, with a re-orderable style list, the ability to group styles in nested folders, and buttons for New, Delete, Clear Overrides, and Clear Attributes Not Defined by Style. What’s the difference between the latter two? Object styles can be defined to include every possible attribute but are rarely so defined. Instead, many attributes are simply not enabled. For instance, you may have an object style that doesn’t include a drop shadow. Now, if you applied the style to an object and then selectively gave the object a drop shadow, that effect is an attribute not defined by the style. Clear Overrides, on the other hand, is relevant if the style does define a drop shadow but you later change the shadow angle on the individual object. Double-clicking a style or choosing Style Options from the panel flyout menu will open the robust Object Style Options dialog (see Figure B). Every attribute that may be given to a container— and many for content—is organized within this dialog. On the General pane, in the Style Settings area, is an expandable tree detailing the attributes defined in the style. The list of attributes on the left matches the summary of Style Settings and offers in one place access to just about every option you can set on the Swatches, Stroke, Effects, Story, Text Wrap, and other frames and in the Corner Options, Text Frame Options, Anchored Object Options, Effects Options, and other dialogs. Beneath the deceptively named Basic Attributes list is a replicated Effects Options section. Using the Effects For drop-down menu to select the element affected, you can apply the various Photoshop-esque transparency effects to containers and contents and individually to fills, strokes, text, and images. Although most creatives prefer to design a live object on the page or pasteboard, applying needed attributes, and then produce an object style from the object, others know precisely what they want and can build the style in Object Style Options from scratch, by setting options without an object ready. Which way you choose depends on your particular work style. The Preview box at the bottom of the dialog will show changes in a selected object as you make them either during initial style creation or later tweaking.

next to come............
Libraries
Snippets
Style Shortcuts
Quick Apply
Scripting