Office 2007 Bible

Fine-Tuning Objects

If you can’t find just the right Design Gallery object or other object settings to meet your needs, or if you just like noodling around with design possibilities in your publications, you may find yourself creating and positioning many objects. Although you can drag with the mouse and use tools such as the Measurement toolbar to help you size and position objects, other shortcuts might be more appropriate in some cases. This section shows you some more tricks—aligning and grouping objects, and wrapping and hyphenating text.

Aligning objects

Aligning objects can be a little frustrating, especially if you have a finicky mouse or are working with a notebook touchpad to drag objects. You can use the arrow keys to move a selected object, but each press of a key merely nudges the object a very small distance in the indicated direction. Plus, if you’re trying to do something trickier such as align multiple selected objects, you have no precise way to do it with the mouse.

Use the commands on the Arrange Align or Distribute submenu instead of the mouse to align multiple selected objects. After you Shift+click to select the desired objects, select one of the commands on that submenu to align the objects’ left, center, and right horizontal dimensions or top, middle, or bottom vertical dimensions. You also can use the Distribute Horizontally or Distribute Vertically choice ...