Move objects above or below each other

- [Instructor] Every object on your page is in a stack. It's kind of like each object is a separate piece of paper in your document, and you can move them above and below each other. Now, some people call this the Z order, like each object has an X and a Y coordinate on the page, right? But it also has a Z coordinate, and that describes which object is on top of which. Now, here in this interactive document from the exercise files folder, I'm going to change the stacking order, or the Z order, of some frames, and those frames are on the first page of the document.

So I'll open my Pages panel, double-click on the first page, and then close my Pages panel again. Now I'd like to select this image here, so I click once on it. But you'll see that I didn't select the image. I selected this other frame that's sitting on top of the image. So how can I select what's behind that, like that image back there? Well, you can select through one object to an object behind it by holding down the Command key on the Mac or the Control key on Windows and then clicking.

I Command or Control + Click once, and I select that image. Command/Control + Click again and I select the frame in the back of that image, and then I'll do it one more time, and I've selected the object on the top again because there's no more objects behind. Let's go ahead and select that image, and I'm going to move that up. And to do that, I'm going to go to the Object menu and then choose from the Arrange sub-menu and then choose Bring Forward. Now it doesn't look like anything happened. That's because the stack of all the objects is based on all the objects on the spread.

That is, it did move on top of some other object, but that other object is not necessarily over here by this frame. Maybe it moved on top of this image down here. I don't know. So for that reason, there was no visual difference. However, if we go back to that Object menu and then choose Arrange > Bring to Front, now it does move on top of that frame. It's all the way on top of all the objects on the spread. All right, let's try another one. I happen to know there's another image hiding behind here, so I'll click once to select that object.

Now Command or Control + Click to get all the way through to the object behind it. Go back to the Object menu and choose Arrange > Bring to Front, and there it is. To fix the problem in the middle of the page, I'm going to select that object on top, and I'm going to send that all the way to the back by choosing Arrange > Send to Back. And finally, I'm going to choose the gray frame back here and send that to the back. There we go. Now that's the effect I'm looking for. 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 something that would allow 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 I'll talk about next.