Adding anchored objects can be a little tedious. One of the most painful aspects of making anchored frames to hold illustrations, sidebar notes, or headlines is the tediousness of the repetitive filling out of the anchored object dialog box.

The simple solution is to make those settings in an object style.

Then all you do is place the object as an inline graphic and hit the shortcut to convert it to an anchored object and to offset it where you need it. Or place it, hit the shortcut and then insert it into the text where you need it. It will automatically be anchored and offset as you designed it.

Let’s make a style to automatically offset a frame into the sidebar area next to the column on a single column page

Make a new Object style with all the options turned off . Turn on Anchored Object and set it up like you see below. We’re assuming a four-inch column on a 7.5″ wide page. You can adjust to fit your page size.

Basic settings for an anchored object

TIP: Once you have your anchored style set up the way you like, save the document you are working on.

Then close all documents and go to the Object Styles palette (with no document open). Choose Load Object Styles… from the Option Menu and add the new object style from the document you just saved and closed. Close InDesign and reopen it to save your new application default.

From then on, all new documents will have this style available. In most cases, all you will have to do it modify the offsets to make it work for any new project.

Believe me, you’ll use this (or your version of it) a lot!