Tip of the Week: Duplicating Objects Across Spreads

Mike Rankin

2

This InDesign tip on duplicating objects across a spread was sent to Tip of the Week email subscribers on June 21, 2018.

Sign up now and every week you’ll get a new tip, keyboard shortcut, and roundups of new articles, plus exclusive deals sent right to your Inbox!

Just scroll down to the bottom of this page, enter your email address, and click Go! We’ll take care of the rest. Now, on with the tip!

You probably know that you can quickly duplicate an object in InDesign by holding the Option or Alt key while dragging. InDesign gives you a clue that the object will be duplicated by showing a double arrow at your cursor.

Simple and easy, right? Yes, for the most part. But you might occasionally see that it doesn’t work when you try to duplicate an object to a different spread. The trick is to hold Option or Alt before you start dragging the object. This is not the case when you’re duplicating an object on the same spread. You can press Option or Alt at any time before you release to duplicate an object. But for whatever reason, InDesign is a little fussy about the sequence of key presses when you drag to a different spread. If you do it wrong (i.e. start dragging before you press Option/Alt), you’ll see the double “duplicate” cursor change to a single “move” cursor when you cross the spread boundary.