How to Make Hyperlinking Easier in InDesign for Digital Planners

Hyperlinking is a crazy long task when it comes to making a digital planner. And in InDesign, they haven’t made it easy for us. There isn’t a shortcut assignment to hyperlinks in InDesign.

So, we’re going to make one. Or, rather, two.

First, we are going to make a shortcut for creating a new hyperlink, and then we’re going to create one for editing a hyperlink. We’ll be using ‘H’ and ‘Shift+H’.

I find that I’m often creating hyperlinks by making an empty rectangle. That way, I have some padding or extra space for someone to click on. If just the text is hyperlinked, sometimes that can be quite a small target when using an iPad, depending on the size of your planners.

So, I’m duplicating a rectangle (holding Alt or Opt and dragging the rectangle) more often than creating a new one. So, for me, I use the ‘Edit Hyperlink’ function more often. Because of this, I am going to use ‘H’ to edit my hyperlink, and ‘Shift+H’ to create a new hyperlink.

To create a hyperlink normally, we would right-click our object, go ‘Hyperlinks’ and then ‘New Hyperlink’.

To edit our shortcuts, first we go to the ‘Edit’ menu, and then near the bottom we can see ‘Keyboard Shortcuts’.

Then, we’re going to click ‘New Set’. This is because we can’t edit InDesign’s default shortcuts, but we can create our own.

We’re going to name it, and base it on the default set so we keep all of the default shortcuts like normal.

We’re going to select the area ‘Panel Menus’.

And luckily for us, all of the things we can create shortcuts for are sorted in alphabetical order, so find ‘Hyperlinks’.

So, now we assign our shortcuts. Luckily for us, Shift+H isn’t assigned to anything, so we’re free to use it, but H is assigned to the hand tool. However, that’s not a tool I ever use, because if you hold down Spacebar then that also activates the hand tool. However, if you use the hand tool often, you may want to choose a different shortcut to use.

Then, you can click ‘OK’, because you’re all finished. You don’t need to click ‘Save’.

Now, you can test out your hyperlinks.

But, how else can we make hyperlinking faster? Well, we can use sections to give our pages names and make the process of hyperlinking faster. So, instead of hyperlinking to page 316, we hyperlink to sep8. This is way easier to keep track of and makes the whole process much faster.

I go over how to use sections in a past post, so I’ll just show what hyperlinking looks like.

However you do hyperlinking, keep in mind that if you move your pages around, then the hyperlinks move too. For example, I inserted a new page after jan29 (so, this created a new jan30 and the old jan30 became jan31). See how my hyperlink stayed attached to that page:

This can be both a blessing and a curse, so just keep that in mind as you’re creating your planner.