Everything we have done so far position wise has been manual, apart from the step-and-repeat. Let us try something a little different here. What we are going to do is just click to deselect all of the guides here at the bottom. You are just going to drag up here and may be get rid of all, but the first two guides. So select all of those that we can see. We will highlight it there and just hit delete to get rid of them. If we select any guide as we know, we can position it numerically here inside the Control palette. This palette also allows us to do very simple calculations which are quite a fun.

Let us say, we have this position currently at 33.194 mm and we have to move it by 20.25 mm. If we do not want to calculate that, what you can actually do is that we get rid of the millimeter value here and simply say + 20.25 and simply hit Return or Enter. InDesign will do the calculation for us and move that guide down to that location.

Now, this is not just applied to guides. Anything in InDesign that you wish to move just simply add or remove the value. So let us say it is now at 53.444, we could again select the millimeters this time, say, minus 20.25, hit Enter and it will subtract that value giving us a new one. So again, very accurate positioning of these elements numerically or manually and do bear in mind that everything we have seen so far is relative to that zero lock. So this value we are seeing right here for this guide is based on its position from this zero. If we wanted to position this guide exactly 20 mm down from this point, all we would have to do is drag the zero lock down to snap it onto the border here of our column. The guide is still selected. This value now shows 23 as opposed to 33 mm. We could highlight that, key in 20; say OK and it will move accordingly. So again, it is a wonderful accuracy inside of InDesign.

We are going to take a slight diversion for a second. Come down to the Tools palette and select any one of these rectangle tools, either the standard frame or just the rectangle tool itself. Just click and drag and draw a shape that sits somewhere inside that first column. It does not matter what size or shape it is, go back to your Selection tool for a second. Now what we see up here in the Measurements palette is the fact that we have the X and the Y axes, exactly the same as we saw a second ago. But an object also has access to its angle points so we can base the positions around any of the corners or center points of this object when we are measuring it. But importantly, let us say we have a width and a height and we wanted to scale one of these values down by, say, 66%. We want to make it 2/3 its current height. All you have to do, instead of working out with 66% in this case 57.2% mm, would be simply to highlight that value, key in 66 and the % key and hit Enter and InDesign will do the calculation for you. So you can scale anything simply by using a calculation command.