Using layers to create MSOs

- Managing content for MSOs can get a bit complicated when you go beyond just images for a slideshow. Once you get into a situation like that it's often easier to isolate the content for each state on its own layer. Let's take a look at some ways to make that easier. Now I'm in the exercise file called layers.indd and I'm going to need a couple of panels to work on for this exercise. I'm going to first of all pull out my Object States panel and I'm also going to need my Layers panel so let's pull this out here also.

And I've got my five objects that I want to turn into a multistate object and you can see as I click on them that in the Layers panel things are highlighting. So you can see that each one of these is on its own layer. Now of course I can't leave it like this. I want these to be all lined up quite nicely so let's do that first. Let's select them all. And I'm going to come back and close my Links panel.

I don't know how that got open. And I'm going to open up the Align panel and let's just click Align Left and Align Top. Now that looks a little bit confusing here. It's a little difficult to see anything. You can't really read any of the text. Now this is where the Layers panel is going to come in really handy. So let's just pull this up. And I am going to want to work on each one of these individually. Now here's the trick. I'm going to opt + click or alt + click on Windows on the eyeball next to each one of these layers.

So when I click on the one for the Golden Gate I'm turning off all the rest. And as I click through I'm doing the same thing for all of them. And I can go through and I can see what I need to do if there's any text that needs to be changed it can be changed without any confusion. I'm just going to opt + click again on the one that's visible. And all of the other layers are going to light up. Now I can get rid of this background layer because I don't really need it here but I need these.

And so I've got them all selected again and I'm going to pull out my Object States panel. And I'm just going click on the Convert selection to multi-state object. And there you go. Each layer is now an individual state in a multistate object. And by keeping each state isolated on those layers and understanding how to manage those layers you can more easily work on your content before converting it to an MSO.