Aligning and distributing objects

When you're working with multiple objects on a page in one of your publications and you need to line them up perfectly, clicking and dragging them manually can lead to imperfect results. It might not be pleasing to the eye, almost distracting. So there are some tools to help us line up our objects, but the first step, of course, is to select them. We are going to work with our fall version of our TT catalogue called TTCatalogue4. Notice we are on page 4, 5 here, and it's on page 5 where we see the objects that need to be lined up.

You have to decide whether or not you are going to be lining up relative to the margins on your page, or relative to one another, and there is a difference. First of all, we need to select those objects. So we'll click the first one, hold down your Shift key and click the other three. Notice all four objects are now selected, meaning we can line them up. We do that with the Home tab of the Ribbon selected. In the Arrange Group, you'll see an Align dropdown button. When we click this, we can choose to align them up on the left-hand side, the center, the tight-hand side, top, middle, bottom for some vertical alignments, and you'll notice down below what's very important here is Relative to Margin Guides is selected by default.

Depending if you've used this before, you'll see the last setting, but by default, it will be relative to your margin guides. So, for example, if we chose to align them centered, they would be lined up right down the middle of our two pages, relative to those margin guides. If we choose Right, they will be lined up on the right margin. So let's try that, and that actually looks pretty good. It would be nice it was moved over a little bit more, though. So let's try Undo, Ctrl+Z on your keyboard to undo that. Go back up to Align, and we'll turn off Relative to Margin Guides.

Now things will be lined up relative to the objects themselves. So if we chose Right, it would take the rightmost object and line them up there. So in this case, let's just drag this bottom one in a little bit. Now you have to deselect and just click that one item, drag it into position, closer to the margin than what we saw, and this is the rightmost object still, and this is what's going to be used. So we'll select the others, holding down your Shift key, we'll go up to Align, and we are going to choose Align Right.

Notice now they're all lined up, with the rightmost object on the right-hand side. This is a little closer to the margin than we saw, when we are using Relative to the Margins. Now there is a whole bunch of different options. Now in this case we did want to line them up vertically on the right-hand side of our page, so we want to choose from one of these three options. But we also have some other options for aligning them up horizontally, along the Top, Middle, or Bottom, in those cases, and you do have some options for distributing them. If, for example, we want them equally split apart, we want the space between each one the same, Distribute Vertically is going to take the top one and the bottom one and divide the space equally, so when we choose this, you might see a slight adjustment, very subtle, but they are equally spaced, and that's also very pleasing to the eye when working with multiple objects in a publication.