Adding or removing a state

- Working with MSOs is no different than any part of a creative project. You're going to have to make changes along the way. Among those changes might be adding or removing a state. Doing either is a relatively easy process. Let's see how. I've got an MSO selected here. This file is called states.indd, and it's in your exercise files. I'm going to open up the Object States panel. You can see I've got my states in here, and I'm going to go down to the last state, which is San Diego, and I've been told that we're not going to include this in this presentation, so I need to take this out.

There's two ways I can get rid of this state. I can either come down to the trash can here and delete the selected state, or I can open the Panel menu and just say Delete State. Let's do that. It's going to warn me it's got content in that, and it's going to take the content along with the state, and I'm going to say OK. And just as I finish that, the phone rings, and I'm told, "You know, we may still keep it, "so take it out, but hang on to the content." Well, all right.

I've got some time here, so I'm just going to undo that with Command+Z, Control+Z on Windows, of course, and I've got that back in here. And now I need to get it out, but I don't want to lose the content. We've got a separate command for that, so let's make sure we've got this state selected still. And let's open up that Panel menu again. Now I've got a command here that says "Release State to Objects." So I'm going to click on that. And now, that content has been taken out of the multi-state object, but it's its own standalone content.

Let's see, I can just drag this off here so that you can see that that's just a group here. And I can just get this out of the way. You can see back here is my multi-state object without San Diego included. That's it! What if you're told, "Let's put it back?" All right, well, easy enough. I'm going to select the multi-state object, and I'm going to come down here, and I'm going to get that group that has San Diego in it, and I will marquee select to get them both. I'm just going to open up the Layers panel here so you can see what I've got going on here.

I've got the San Diego group selected, and I have the California MSO selected. Now, I want to get this San Diego state back into my multi-state object. So let me get the Layers panel out of the way again. And I want to make sure that I've got these things lined up. So I'm going to use my alignment tools, and I can either open up the alignment panel or I can use the tools up in the control panel, and I'll just use those, and I'll say "Align left" just to make sure.

And let's align the tops as well. So, and now I've got everything aligned, I'm going to pull the Object States panel out here a little bit so that you can see that down at the bottom I've got some choices here. And one of them is Convert selection to multi-state object. Now, in the past, we had all these separate objects, but none of them was a multi-state object, so now I've got a group, and I've got an MSO. Let's see what happens if we click on this. And sure enough, it's just taken that content and kept my original multi-state object and put that extra group back in as that last state.

That's it! Just because you have to add or remove a state, there's no need to panic or start over.