Advanced Anchored Objects In Adobe InDesign CC

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at doing Anchored Objects that aren't in the flow of text, well at least they're on the side here. Watch this, if I add some returns, it flows along but it's not in that particular text box. I'm going to show you some cool tricks for doing that, plus how to deal with multiple objects, by grouping them. Let's go and do that now in InDesign.

So first thing is, let's bring in our Image. So let's go to 'File', 'Place', on page 1 in our Tables page, and I'm going to bring it in from the 'Exercise Files'. '03 Magazine', and there's one in there called 'Image1-Coffee-Table'. I'm going to bring mine in over here. Just a random size, we'll change it in a second. So, I've got this guy here. Now, a normal Anchored Object, all you do is grab your Black Arrow, cut it, so 'Edit', 'Cut'. Get your cursor where you want it to be, let's say, here. Then you just paste it, so I've used dear old Paste. That means it kind of flows up and down with the text, but I want to do some more advanced stuff.

I'm going to put it back over there and I'm going to do a couple of things, I want to add a Title over here. So this one's going to be called 'Coffee Tables'. I'll use my Paragraph Style, that I prefer. Where are you? 'Styles', created a 'Sub Heading' one. It doesn't work because I did some stuff to it when we were working with the Keep Options, so I'm going to click off in the background, nothing selected, open up 'Sub Headings', go down to 'Keep'. And I'm going to say, 'Anywhere', so '0', 'Anywhere'. For some reason I've got this Paragraph Shading as well, which we can turn off here, under 'Paragraph Shading'. Turn that off. Okay, good.

So all it wanted was a Heading. But what I'd like to do is, instead of beginning at the flow of text I want it to be out here, but kind of connected to the flow of text. So that's what we're going to do. The quick easy option is that, see this blue box here? Black Arrow, blue box, what you can do is, you, drag, drag, drag. I want you to flow along there. The cool thing about that, is you can see it's got like a little Anchored Object now. So even though it's not in the flow of text, watch this, if I put in a 'return', it goes along with the text. So even like that, just like that, that's super handy. Especially if you've got diagrams that pop out on the side that help explain things that are in the text. So that's some more advanced Anchored Objects.

What I'm going to do is, I'm going to undo until it is back over here without it being linked in. I want to show you a couple of other things. Let's say I want to maybe put this inside of a circle. So we're going to kind of use some our options that we used earlier on. Some of the drawing techniques. I'm going to use the Ellipse tool. I'm going to hold 'Shift' to draw out an Ellipse, and with this right at the top of this guy, I'm going to cut the image and select on my circle, and go to 'Edit', 'Paste into'. It gives me my image inside this circle, which is awesome.

Next of all I want an Ellipse. And what I want to do is have No Fill. Actually don't have that circle over here. I have nothing selected, then go to Ellipse and say No Fill, and like a Stroke of 'MF Green'. It's under 'Maynooth', 'MF'. I'm going to go up to about 6pts, I'm going to draw out an Ellipse. Roughly about that sort of size, maybe increase it up to this size. And I want to stick this together with these two. And I want it to flow along with the text. First of all, I want to align it. So I can see my Align panel over here. You might have to go to 'Window', 'Object', 'Align' and go, you, and you. So align vertical and horizontal. Watch this, I can't anchor this now. That little blue box isn't there, I can't paste it in, just doesn't work.

So if you ever find yourself in this position where you've got two things, kind of two separate things - I'm going to scale him around for no reason. - you have to group them first, so select both of these, go to 'Object', 'Group' or 'Command G' on a Mac, or 'Control G' on a PC. Then grab this little blue box, just drag him in. Now that little group will follow along. So the easy thing is grabbing the blue box, and dragging it where you need it to be. And this little extra kind of information is that if you have got multiple parts, like the image and the circle they need to be grouped first, then they can flow along with the text. All right, that's it for Anchored Objects. Let's get on to the next video.