TIP 7: Managing Palettes

GoLive CS2 lets you stash palettes on the left and right edges of your monitor to save precious screen real estate. We really like the Adobe palettes, but let's face ityou want to look at documents, not a clutter of palettes. To stash a palette, grab its tab and drag it to the left or right edge of the monitor (Figure 7a).

Figure 7a. Palettes can be neatly stashed on the right or left edges of your computer screen.

Stashing and Unstashing All Palettes

No doubt you'll really like the way GoLive CS2 stashes palettes to maximize your usable screen real estate. But opening and closing lots of palettes can still be tedious. A cool power user trick is to Option/Alt-Click on a stashed palette to open or close all stashed palettes simultaneously.

Click the tab of a stashed palette, and it slides into view. Click the tab again, and it slides back to its stashed position. To stash more than one palette together in a group, just drag another palette by its tab into a stashed palette. To adjust the height of a stashed palette, click its bottom edge and slide it up or down (Figure 7b).

Figure 7b. When your cursor turns into a two-sided arrow, you can drag the edge of a stashed palette to lengthen or shorten it. That's great when you want to stash several palettes together.

Note

Mac OS X users should note that it's not possible to stash palettes on the same monitor edge as the OS X dock.

Rearranging Palette Tabs

This might not seem like a big deal, but if you've used Adobe applications as long as we have, you'll appreciate the following attention to detail: GoLive lets you rearrange palettes that are grouped together without having to ungroup them first! That's correct, you can grab a palette tab and move it to the left or right of any other tab in the group until you have it situated just how you like it.

GoLive CS2 also has docked palettes that match the behavior of other Adobe applications, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. To dock a palette, grab its tab and hold it over the bottom edge of another palette until you see a highlight line appear and then let go (Figure 7c). Now when you move the top palette, any palettes docked along with it will move, too.

Figure 7c. A highlight appears when the palettes overlap. If you let go, the palettes will be docked together.

Docking groups of palettes top to bottom is a great way to manage your palettes, and it makes it easy to move them all around at one time. The problem with docking palettes is that if you dock too many tall ones, the lower ones can get lost off the bottom of the screen. To remedy that problem, click the triangle to the left of the palette names to twirl open or close a palette set (Figure 7d).

Figure 7d. Click the handy-dandy arrow button on the upper left of a palette group to collapse the entire group.