Creative Toolbox

If you rely heavily on layers in your InDesign documents to help manage and select the abundance of objects in them, you may have become irritated when you wanted to temporarily stash objects into a locked or hidden layer. InDesign makes it seem as though you can’t move objects without first unlocking and/or unhiding your destination layer. But it turns out you can force the objects to any layer you want; regardless of it being locked or hidden.

Although Illustrator and InDesign’s Layers palettes are virtually identical in how you work with them, they do differ in how you can move selected objects from one layer to a locked or hidden layer. Illustrator allows you to move a objects to locked or hidden layer with no complaints whatsoever. InDesign however, does not.

When attempting to move the layer target dot to a locked or hidden layer, you’ll quickly realize that InDesign doesn’t allow you to do this.

To overcome this, simply hold down Command (Mac) or Control (Windows) before dragging the layer target dot to your destination layer. This works for locked or hidden layers. Of course, if you want to duplicate your selected objects instead of moving them to another layer, hold down Option/Alt as well.

If you hold down the Command key (Mac) or Control key (Windows) before you drag the layer target dot, you can successfully force the selected objects to a locked or hidden layer.