From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Moving objects above or below each other - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Moving objects above or below each other

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- [Instructor] Every object on your page is in a stack. It's like each object is a separate piece of paper in your document, and you can move them above and below each other. Here in this interactive document from the exercise files folder, let's jump to page four by choosing it from this little pop-up menu in the lower left corner. Now I want to select this image over here, so I'll click. But unfortunately, there's another frame on top of it. So how can you select what's behind that text frame? Well, you could just click down here, of course. But let's pretend that this text frame was totally covering up the image. Well, you can select through one object to another object behind it by holding down the Command key on the Mac, or Control key on windows and then click. Command or control click once and it selects through that object to the next object down. That's the image. Do it again and it selects that background frame. Do it one more time and it reselects the top most object. That's because there are no more objects behind it. Okay, one more Command or Control click to select the graphic frame. Now that we have the image selected, we can go to the Object menu and look inside the Arrange sub menu. Inside the Arrange sub menu, you have several options, including Bring to Front and Bring Forward. Let's try Bring Forward. It doesn't seem like anything happened. Well, that's because the stack is based on all the objects on the spread. That is, this did move higher than some other object, but we just have no idea which one. However, if we go back to the Object menu, look inside Arrange, and then choose Bring to Front. Well, now it moved to the top of the stack. It's on top of all the other objects on the spread. Okay, now let's select this frame in the background. Head back to the Object menu and look inside the Arrange sub menu. You'll notice that Send Backward is not grayed out, and that means that it's not actually the back most object on the spread. So let's send it all the way to the back. Wow, check that out. There was another object hiding back there. Now what would be really cool is if we could get some kind of visual on these stacks showing us exactly which objects are above or below others, and then allowing us to control this visually instead of haphazardly with this menu command. And we're in luck because InDesign does offer that. It's called the Layers panel, and that's what we'll look at in the next movie.

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