From the course: InDesign Secrets

348 Make a quick grid from objects on your page - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

348 Make a quick grid from objects on your page

- [David] I have a bunch of objects on my page here and I want to lay them out in a grid. Now one way to do this is just start dragging this around. I could grab this object with the selection tool and start dragging it, and you'll see these green lines appear. Those green lines are Smart Guides, so here the Smart Guides tell me that this object and the one to the left of it are perfectly aligned, so when I let go of the mouse button, it clicks into place. So I could drag all of these around. But of course, this is going to be really tedious to put all of these into a grid. Now you could speed this up a little bit by going to the Window menu, coming down to Object & Layout and then choosing Align. Now I could select those objects and click these buttons in the Align Objects or Distribute Objects sections. But here again, you can still only manage one row or one column at a time and you're still going to have to do a lot of grouping. Again, it's a hassle. There just has to be a better way. Well, there is a Grid feature inside the Edit menu. If I come up here to the Edit menu and choose Step & Repeat, inside that Step & Repeat dialogue box you'll see "Create as a grid." But here, this is for duplicating an object into a grid, not rearranging objects I already have. So that too won't help me. Fortunately, there is actually an easy way to do this, though it does take a few steps. Here's what you do. First, I'm going to close my Align panel and I'm going to come over here to the Tool panel and I'll choose the Content Collector tool, or you could press the B key on your keyboard. Next I want to drag that Content Collector tool over all the objects to grab them. Now we need the Content Placer tool which you can get by pressing the B key on your keyboard again. The B key toggles back and forth between the Collector and the Placer. So you see down here, this temporary panel that appears? There's the collection of all my objects, all seven of them. Now I need a section of my page which I don't have any objects, or you could use your pasteboard. In this case, I'm going to zoom back to fit the Page in Window by pressing Command or Control + 0. Now I'll move this temporary panel up to the top. Down here, at the bottom of my page, I'm going to start dragging out with the Content Placer tool and then, while I'm still holding down the mouse button, I'm going to press the Up arrow key on my keyboard to add a row. See that? I now have two objects in a little grid. Now I'll hit the Right arrow key to add a column, so I have a 2 x 2 grid. I'll press the Up arrow key and the Right arrow key one more time, so now I have a 3 x 3 grid. Now all I need to do is drag my shape around until I get the grid just the way I want it to look. Then, when I let go of the mouse button, all those objects are placed into the grid. Now I should point out that these are duplicates of the originals. The Content Placer makes duplicates, so now I need to go back to the Selection tool, or I could have pressed the V key on my keyboard, and I'm going to select all of those objects in the original jumble, and just press the Delete key to delete them. Now obviously this is far from perfect. Like, you can't really control which image goes where, and if you have images that are very different aspect ratios, like some are portrait and some are landscape, you're going to have to still adjust them in the grid afterward. Nevertheless, if you have a lot of objects that you need to put into a grid, this is a lot faster than just dragging them around.

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