In the past you had to create a separate text container for your headline when you wanted to span it across a multi-column text box in InDesign. This presented problems with accurate spacing, and was a general pain in the behind. Thankfully, Adobe InDesign CS5 makes the process simple.
Headlines look pretty horrible in multi-column text by default
As you can see in the image above, a headline that stays in the multi-column format looks pretty horrible. Most people want to have the headline span across both columns. It’s simple to do, and you don’t need to create a separate text box to do it.
First, select the text you want to span columns, then click the fly-out menu icon in the Paragraphs panel and choose Span Columns… to activate the Span Columns dialog box you see below.
InDesign's Span Columns dialog box offers you plenty of customization
Simply choose Span Columns from the drop-down menu, choose the number of columns you want the headline to span, and optionally choose how much space before and/or after the spanned text you want.
InDesign's Span Columns results make it easy to work with your text
After you hit OK, your text will span the columns (as seen above), and will easily reflow with any text changes you make to the body text before or after the spanned text.
I am so much interest to create a design by using in design. This tips is so much helpful for me. Thanks…
Glad to help! It’s going to be hard to get used to using this new feature, but it’s going to be a huge time saver when we do.
Awesome! What a time-saver! I’ve still been doing this the old way – with multiple text boxes. Thanks for the tip!
Í´m loving those tips. i´m learning InDesign an those posts are a great help.
Thanks for sharing.