This post is part of my Affinity Publisher Tool by Tool series. I will be going through every tool and window and explaining the most important features and options in general, as well as those most important to printable and low content book creators.
In this first video we start with a simple but important tool, the Move Tool.
If you are brand new to Affinity, you may find it a bit frustrating at first and so here is my most important tip:
Tip: What your mouse “does” is influenced by what tool you have selected on the left toolbar
So, if you create some text and want to adjust the placement of it, if you have the text tool selected, you will end up creating a new text box.
Instead, you need to switch back to the Move Tool. Adobe products work this way too, but if you are coming from Powerpoint, Canva, etc. it is a bit of an adjustment at first.
Let’s see what else the move tool does besides the obvious (move things)
The Move Tool is the uppermost tool on the left toolbar, and has an arrow icon.
Keyboard Shortcut: V
Functions: Selects objects, moves objects, scales objects, rotates objects
When you select the move tool, and you have an object in your document (e.g. a text box, shape, image, etc.) the first thing that will happen when you click on that object is that it selects it. Your selected object now has a bounding box around it.
Selecting an object is key to being able to edit and manipulate it.
Once your object is selected, then you can click and hold the left mouse button and move it around. So that is the move part of the Move tool.
Scaling an object
You can also grab any of the corner handles, the little dots in the corners of the bounding box, and you can scale things in and out.
If you want to scale things proportionately, that is, lock the aspect dimensions here, hold shift, and then it will resize in proportion.
If you want to just move in a single direction, you can grab one of the dots that are in the middle of any of the sides of the bounding box.
Rotating an object
You can also rotate the object by hovering over the pin until you get the double-ended arrows and then you can rotate around.
To rotate in exact increments, you can hold shift, and now it will go in exact 15 degree increments, so it will lock into place as you rotate around every 15 degrees. So that can be useful for a precise rotation.
You can also rotate by just hovering over these corners until you also see those double-ended arrows.
