Stick It: How to Paste Like a Pro

I get excited about weird things, like learning something new in InDesign. I use the program so often and have used it for so long that I assume I know everything worth knowing. Silly me. While Adobe does a great job of adding functionality to the program with each new upgrade, there are a ton of cool things that have been part of InDesign for quite a while. You don’t seek them out until you need to.

When I learn a new tip, it feels like discovering a super-power I didn’t know I had. How cool is that?

Create Art on the Fly

We all know how to paste images and text into frames, right? Did you know you can also paste InDesign object groups into an image frame? Select several elements in your document and group them—try a solid circle with a chunk of text that says “paste like a pro” for starters. Copy the group. Select an empty image frame and use the “paste into” command (OPT-CMD-V). Like magic, your group of objects is now living inside a frame.

You can select the group as you’d select an image and move it around within the frame. You can make it bigger. You can rotate it. You can even select individual items and alter them individually to change colors, fix a typo, delete an element, or try a different color.

I think my all-time favorite paste command is “paste in place.” Let’s say you’ve got your gi-normous document all laid out and at the last minute decide you want to add your “Paste like a pro” whiz-bang graphic detail on certain pages. And you want that detail to be positioned exactly the same way on each page. There are lots of ways to do this, of course. And then there’s the easy way. Copy the element and use the “paste in place” command (OPT-Shift-CMD-V) to paste it in exactly the same position on each page of your choosing. The command will remember whether you copied your element from a right- or left-hand page, so keep that in mind as you work. Sweet!