Tip of the Week: Move Items with Precision

This tip was sent to Tip of the Week email subscribers on July 2, 2015.

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Need to move one or more objects a specific distance on the page? Select the object(s) and then open the Move dialog box with any of the following methods:

Press Command+Shift+M (Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+M (Windows)

Double-click either the Selection or Direct Selection tools in the Tools panel

Option/Alt-click the X or Y icons in the Control panel.

Screen Shot 2015-07-01 at 11.09.50 PM

In the dialog box, enter in the values for horizontal/vertical movement or distance/angle and click OK.

If you want to make a copy of the selected object(s) at the new location, click Copy.

The dialog box also remembers the last used value (until you quit and restart InDesign), so if you have to move a bunch of items on different spreads or in different documents, you don’t have to keep typing in the same numbers.

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This article was last modified on July 25, 2019

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