Gradients in CS5 InDesign ("How the...")

Question

I sure hope I can get some answers to this one - I posted another question regarding leading in Paragraph Styles two days ago and by now it has 28 views and 0 answers! Such support.
Just designing a two-color gradient in CS5 InDesign is headache enough...click on Swatches control panel, see that there is no "New Gradient Swatch" button at the bottom (despite what the books and online help say), click the microscopic menu at the upper right of the panel, select "New Gradient Swatch", only to find that there are only two choices - Linear or Radial - and fiddle with every feature in the window to finally get the color range you want.
Frankly, five very expensive versions of Creative Suite later, I am both amazed and disgusted at the fact that:
- There is no horizontal gradient, only "Linear" (and that is vertical; that is, each color within the range goes top-to-bottom; the range itself is left-to-right)
- There is no seeming way to get a horizontal gradient, or a vertical gradient with the colors reversed. InDesign decides the orientation and polarity (in this instance, dark (left) to light (right) ) of your gradient
And before anyone launches into a lecture about the Window > Color > Gradient option, I already tried that. I don't know what your copy of CS5 InDesign displays on your system, but on mine, that window has no OK button. In other words, you can play around all day long with the Window > Color > Gradient window but you cannot apply what you've settled on to your current project because there is no way to tell the program that "OK, I'm done, please apply the options I've selected to my project or selected swatch."
So, tell me truly, how can a newly-bald user design a simple two-color gradient that has vertical range, where lightest color is at the top and darkest color at the bottom?

Answer 1

It's not really that hard. To make a new gradient Select New Gradient Swatch from the Swatches flyout. You should get a dialog that looks like this
When you click on one of the gradient stop at thebottom of the ramp you will activate the ability to choose a color for that stop in the color mode you want
If you choose CMYK you can mix the color or you can choose Swatches and choose from existing swatches in the file.  This is how it looks with both selected
When youOK the dialog a new swatch is added to the Swatch panel. You can apply it by drawing or selecting an object in your file and making the fill box active . It should look like this
In the Gradient window shown to the right of the object you can change the angle by using either the Reverse button or the angle window like this
Or you can use the Gradient tool from the tool box to drag across the gradient to change it as you want
If you want here's the difference in a radial gradient changed with the gradient tool from the tool box