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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Contents
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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