Adobe FrameMaker 10: Drag and Drop

By Barb Binder

I was walking to my gate recently, and overheard an elderly woman complaining to a younger woman as they passed me in the airport. All I heard her say was, “Why do they give us so many ways of doing the same thing?” Who knows what she was talking about, but it made me smile because I hear the same sentence all the time in my various Adobe training classes. One of the (many) benefits to having spent so many years delivering software training is that I’ve had the opportunity to observe all of the various learning styles and workflow techniques. I try to let each of my classes know early on that even though some of us might be dedicated right mouse button clickers, others (like me) prefer keyboard commands, and still others like to rely exclusively on the menus, we can still be friends. That usually makes my students smile, and with luck, diffuses the otherwise inevitable frustration that can accompany learning more than one way to do the same thing.

So back to drag and drop. It’s just another way to move (or copy) text and elements. To move something, just select it, press down on your left mouse button, and drag the text or element to its new location. And if you’d prefer to copy, just hold down the Control key and do the same thing. (If you see a ?, FrameMaker is telling you that you are trying to move/copy your object to an invalid location.

But that’s not all. This works with column rows and tables within FrameMaker, as long as you add the Alt key to move and Control + Alt to copy.

But there’s more! And as long as you purchase FrameMaker 10 within the next fifteen minutes (kidding!), you can also drag and drop across other applications that support the drag and drop feature.

That said, I’m a happy keyboard shortcut gal, and it’s not likely that the new drag and drop support will be life changing for me. But we can still be friends.

Barb Binder is the president and founder of Rocky Mountain Training. Barbara has been a trainer for nearly two decades and has been recognized by Adobe as one of the top trainers world-wide. Connect Learning is pleased to have Barb as the instructor for many of their instructor-led, online Adobe courses.