How do I line up and space objects evenly?

Lining a room up by dragging each object is the slowest work in event diagramming, and a plan that is nearly straight reads as sloppy to the client looking at it. Three controls remove almost all of it.

Select, align, space

1. Select. Drag a box around what you want, or hold Shift and click each piece.
2. Align. ⇤ Left, ⇹ Center, ⇥ Right across; ⤒ Top, ⇳ Middle, ⤓ Bottom down. Everything lands on one line.
3. Space. Space evenly ↔ or ↕ leaves the same amount of floor between each one.

All of it is on the right-hand panel whenever two or more objects are selected, and the same commands are in the right-click menu.

Even gaps, not even middles

This is the part worth understanding, because most tools get it the other way round. “Space evenly” here means equal floor between the objects — not equal distance between their centre points.

With twenty identical rounds the two are the same thing. The moment a selection holds objects of different sizes — an eight-foot bar, a six-foot round, a two-foot highboy — they are not:

Equal gaps is what the eye reads as evenly spaced, and it is the number that matters on a floor: the aisle between two things is what someone has to walk through.

The two objects on the ends stay exactly where they are; everything between them moves. The ends are usually the ones you positioned deliberately — against a wall, beside a door — so they are the ones spacing leaves alone.

When the number matters

Equalising answers “make this look right”. It does not answer “the client wants three feet between the highboys” or “that aisle has to be six feet”. For those, set Gap between in feet and inches and press Apply ↔ or Apply ↕.

The run keeps its starting edge and everything after it is laid out at exactly that distance. Setting the gap to zero pushes tables together into a single long run, which is how you build a head table or a serpentine buffet.

These are planning habits, not code — your local authority and your own posted capacity chart decide the real minimums. For the whole-room version of the question, the capacity calculator does the arithmetic for your actual dimensions.

Two habits that keep a plan tidy

1. Hold Shift while drawing. A ruler, a cable run or a traced area snaps to the nearest 45° while Shift is down, so a measurement is never a degree and a half off level — and a ruler that reads 31′ 2″ across a 31′ wall is worse than no ruler.
2. Decide how placing works. After you place an object the palette either keeps that object loaded so you can keep stamping, or hands your cursor back. The checkbox in the palette sets it and remembers your choice; Esc leaves placing either way.

A table block behaves as one object throughout. Aligning or spacing a selection that includes one moves the whole block and keeps its internal layout, rather than laying its tables out individually.

What else moves with a selection

Locked objects never move — that is what the lock is for, and it is how you pin a stage or a traced wall before tidying everything around it. Everything else travels properly: traced areas keep their shape, cable runs keep their points, and a template block keeps its tables in formation.

If you find yourself aligning the same arrangement in room after room, save it once instead — setups live on the event space and can be a selection rather than the whole plan.