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If you’ve ever had to convert a logo or piece of artwork in Adobe Illustrator CS3 from color to grayscale (or even Pantones to CMYK), you’ve undoubtedly seen the “gradients and patterns will not be converted” warning message. The auto-convert function in Illustrator CS3 doesn’t work on gradients. You could go through the trouble of adjusting the gradient manually, but if you have a lot of different gradients, that can be time-consuming. 
Instead, select all the objects containing gradients (or just hit Command + A to grab everything) and go to the menu bar and select Object>Expand and hit OK. Your gradient is now converted into many objects with different shades of solid colors, rather than a single object with a gradient, so they can easily be converted to grayscale. In most cases, just hitting OK will do the job just fine. But if you find the results not to your liking, you might try adjusting the number of objects created to simulate the gradient at the bottom of the Expand dialog box first. The more objects you create, the smoother the gradient will appear when converted to individual objects. Because you have expanded the gradient to multiple objects, going back and editing the gradient is a royal pain, so be sure to save a copy of the original before you expand it.
What about Illustrator CS4 users?
If you’ve upgraded to Illustrator CS4, rejoice! The ban on gradient conversions has been lifted. We can now convert the colors in gradients to color, grayscale, or RGB by going to the menubar and selecting Edit>Edit Colors and choosing the appropriate option.
You’ve probably done this many times before if you use keyboard shortcuts. You’re editing text and want to switch to the Direct Selection tool by hitting V (the shortcut to switch to the Direct Selection tool), or maybe M (to switch to the Rectange Shape tool) – but wait, you’re in a live text box, so instead of switching tools you end up typing the letter V or M. INCREDIBLY ANNOYING! Thankfully, if you hold the Command key down and click the text box, it deactivates text edit mode so you can safely switch tools with your keyboard.
If you frequently find yourself adjusting the blend mode of layers in your Photoshop document, you can save yourself some time and mouse scrolling by using keyboard shortcuts instead. With the layer you want to adjust selected, cycle through blend modes by hitting Shift + (plus) or Shift - (minus) to drill down through the list and have the mode applied to your layer. If you frequently use Multiply as a blend mode, you can set it by hitting Shift + Option + M. Or Shift + Option + C for Color mode.
If you’re using InDesign CS4, visit the flyout menu in the Links panel and select Relink to Folder… Here you can specify another folder on your drive to find the new images, and even tell it to link to the new .psd or .tif file. The best part is, you can have it relink an entire folder full of images at once. Nice! I hadn’t seen this feature mentioned anywhere, until 