Thursday, July 12, 2007

Deleting Preference files

A common troubleshooting step in many programs is to delete the "preference" file for an application that is acting up. This file (or files), which stores your user preferences, such as your preferred measurement system, color of your guides, etc., can be come corrupt and make the application unstable or behave strangely. When the file is deleted the application creates a new, fresh copy of the file.

To easily delete the preference file in InDesign, InCopy, Photoshop or Bridge, hold down command-option-shift-control (Macintosh) or control-alt-shift (Windows) immediately after you click the icon to launch the application. Keep holding the keys down until you see a dialog box asking you if you want to delete the preference file.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does this work with older versions? I've been trying it with my ancient version of ID2.0 and I'm not getting any luck.

Keith Gilbert said...

Joanne, I'm sorry, I don't know the answer to your question. I can't remember what I did yesterday, much less in 2002 when I was teaching InDesign 2.0! I can verify that it goes back at least to CS2 (version 4.0), since I still had a copy of that here to test.

Anonymous said...

This feature was introduced with InDesign CS (actually it was "borrowed" from Photoshop).

Unknown said...

Thank you sooooooo much Keith!!!! This solved it. This made my week! I couldn't figure it out for the life of me.

For those who have this problem, it took me a few tries to figure out that you need to have these keys (Cntr-Alt-Shift) pressed, literally right after you click the icon, before the pgm even starts loading anything.

Tks again it's a life saver (literally)!!!

MayY . C 五月媽媽 said...

You rock! Thanks for sharing!

Fathima said...

This worked for me in photoshop, but it's not bringing up the dialogue box in indesign...? I'm on version CS3

Matt said...

Thanks so much. I have been having an issue where my Pages Panel has been acting funky, scroll bars go away and pages won't tile, sometimes the panel wouldn't open at all. I had uninstalled and reinstalled the suite several times and it kept happening. Deleted the Preference files and now it works!

Anonymous said...

thanks keith.It worked for me.:)

Anonymous said...

your a champ Keith!

Harry

Anonymous said...

My mac pro doesn't have the alt key so my only option is command option shift control choice. I have the problem in Indesign CC. I do this trick, but my pages doesn't appear or to delete preferences.