How to Automatically Date Your Planner Using Sections in InDesign

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I’ve shared before how to date your planner using data merge, but here’s another way of dating your planner automatically using InDesign’s sections as well as automatic page numbering.

Note: this method is a bit more limited in some ways compared to data merge method, but it’s a bit more accessible when you’re just starting out.

First, we’re going to make our document. You can use whatever your normal settings are here.

Next, you’re going to set up a parent page. A parent page is basically a background. You can choose what pages to apply the parent page to, and what is on the parent page will appear on those pages, but locked. You can then design on top of these pages.

Because of the format I’m doing, I’ll have a parent page for each month. For this, I’ll just set up January.

To create a new parent page, right-click under A-Parent and choose “New Parent”. If you don’t have the pages panel open, go “Window” at the top of your screen, and then find “Pages”. The menus under Window are sorted alphabetically.

Then, we’re going to name our parent. I am calling this one “Daily January”.

Next, I am going to insert our date. To edit the parent page, double-click on it. Use the type tool to create our text box.

I am going to write out the date, but you can use this function however you want to. First, I am going to start with the day of the month. To insert this, we’re going to go to the “Type” menu at the top of our screen, then almost all the day down to the bottom of the options find “Insert Special Character”, and then “Markers” and “Current Page Number”.

This really long series has a shortcut: Ctrl+Alt+Shift+N, or if you’re on Mac it’s Cmd+Opt+Shift+N.

This inserts our current page number. On the B parent, it’ll show up as B, but any pages that have the B parent applied to them will show their own page number.

Before moving to the next step, I am going to make my type a little prettier.

After that, I am going to click the plus symbol at the bottom of the pages panel to add a new page and I will right-click that new page and choose “Numbering and Section Options”.

This page isn’t where we are going to start our page numbering, but rather it is going to be our month spread. For the section, I will give it “january”, and start the page numbering at 1 to make things easier to see. If you have a lot of layouts, you may end up using many sections for things like meal plans, fitness trackers, habit layouts, etc., so keeping everything in sections keeps things a little more organised for us.

So, once I’ve done the month, then I’ll do the daily pages. I’m going to do the exact same thing again, but this time I’m going to do it with ‘jan’ as my section prefix.

I need to apply the parent page we created to jan1. To do this, we can just drag and drop the B parent onto the page we want to change. But, we have 31 days in January, so I’m going to add those as well. Right-click the area outside of the pages in the panel, and then click “Insert Pages”. We can then type in how many pages we want, and choose the parent page they’re based on.

And that’s all there is to it! Now, you can check the pages and make sure they’re dated how you like. The good thing about this method is that it’s really easy to move or change it without having to change every page.