InDesign Pain in the A@@

Question

Ok I worked with Quark all of my career, now I am at a new place and Tech Supp. decided to go all Adobe CS2, I have no problems with that, love the suite, Love Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and so on...
But ID is such a pain in the ...
I work Very large documents, 200 pages plus, so, I make master pages, great, put my text boxes in the masters, to save time and layout pains, so there I go, start flowing the texts, but wait! All items that are on the master pages are lock, and I have to unlock each and every one by hand, don't tell me that does not bug the hell out of anyone here...
At least in quark you could readjust your layout, the master items ARE NOT LOCKED!!!!
Who can tell me in full how to have some items on the master editable and other not... and command shift is not an option with 200 pages and 10 items per page to unlock!
Quark I miss you!

Answer 1

Ok, first of all just a couple of tips...
I noticed if you wanted to give your text frame a border you created two text frames. It's not necessary. Select the text frame and click Cmd+B and you can set the inset spacing.
Also, I highly recommend you take advantage of object styles. They work just like paragraph styles. You can create them by example, too. Just select a formatted text frame and select create new object style. Then you just have to click on the name to apply all the attributes of the frame to any new frame.
Here's a script that will override all master page items. So what you should do is first add all the pages you think you will need and run the script and everything will be unlocked. If you need to add more pages, just ad the pages and rerun the script. You can also assign a keyboard shortcut to the script.
myDoc= app.activeDocument
for (var h = myDoc.pages.length - 1; h >= 0; h--) {
for (var j = myDoc.pages[h].masterPageItems.length - 1; j >= 0; j--){
if(myDoc.pages[h].masterPageItems.length>0){
myDoc.pages[h].masterPageItems[j].override(myDoc.pages[h])
Copy/paste it into a text editor and save it with a .jsx extension in your InDesign>Presets>Scripts folder, then in InDesign go to Window>Automation>Scripts and double click the file name to run the script.