Emily, this is a great topic! First, I'm going to just kinda tack on to what Lapedra said about Paragraph Styles. Other than just giving them really good descriptive names I also like to organize them in the order in which you would typically use them. So something like:
Header 1
Header 2
SubHead 1
SubHead 2
Intro Paragraph
Paragraphs
Bullets
(You get the drift…). I find that if they are organized well, then it sheds off that much more time scrolling through the list looking for them.
A couple of my other InDesign tips might be totally obvious to some people, but I'm going to share them anyways, just in case. This first one I actually just realized you could do a few weeks ago (even though I've been using InDesign for about 6 or 7 years (I was a Quark user prior to that). I was working on an agenda for a conference and wanted to separate the days by a stroke. Typically, I would just do the stroke outside of the text box and whenever the client made changes that increased or decreased the amount of copy in that section I would manually adjust the location of stroke accordingly. Well, on a whim, I decided to create a stroke, then copy and paste it into the section of the text I wanted it. Now, when the copy length changes, the stroke moves with it, so no more moving lines around by hand! Also, if you use the direct select tool, you can still edit the stroke's width, color, style, etc. It has been a life-saver!
Another thing that everyone may already know (but may not…) is that when you are using master pages, if there is something that is on the master page that you need to edit just on one single page of your document, or bring in front of an object, etc. you just have to hit: Shift + Command and Click on that object and it releases it from the master page and makes it editable on your current page.
Looking forward to reading everyone's InDesign "secrets."
