In my line of work, it's all about deadlines and how fast you can meet them – that's why whenever I can streamline my workflow, you bet I'll do it. I'm all about Transmit 'droplets', 'Watched Folders' and most importantly, I love my print presets in Adobe InDesign.

Since I'm constantly printing drafts of documents for editors to review, I required a way to quickly output those jobs with certain specs on specific printers without having to configure those variables every single time in the Print menu.

(As you can see I also have a number of PDF presets, and that's because I choose to print to a postscript file (then sent to Distiller) instead of using ID's built-in 'PDF Export' feature. It's your choice...)

I realize I'm not breaking much new ground with this subject, and yes, InDesign will remember the last print configuration you've used. However if you're going between a half dozen documents at a time and printing at different sizes & formats (PDF), there's nothing more useful than having a handful of print presets to speed you along.

Creating a preset according to your needs couldn't be easier - I'm not going to get into a full-blown tutorial here, but it's basically selecting 'Define...' from the 'Print Presets' menu item under 'File', then plugging in all the settings required for a particular job. Paper size, marks, bleeds, color management - all customizable in the setup menu.

Save your preset by clicking 'Ok', then 'Save' in the Print Presets menu. That's it, you're done!

One other shortcut worth mentioning - to duplicate an existing preset (instead of creating them all manually), highlight any preset from the 'Presets' list and click 'New...'. Voilá, you've now got all the settings from that preset plugged in - change any variable you want, re-name the preset and save. Repeat as necessary!

Pretty much anything you can set in your print menu, you can include as part of a preset — so why on earth would someone waste their valuable time re-adjusting their print settings for every single job?

Those are precious minutes you could be getting your morning coffee, surfing the web, or chatting up that attractive single co-worker...