If you have a Freehand document that has elements you want to add to the document you’re working on you don’t need to open the file to select it’s contents and than paste them into your working document. Just take the document that contains the elements you need and drop it over your working document.

Many times we use certain elements on our design repetitively. Logos for example are usually appearing several times throughout our documents. Once this repetitive element changes, we have to go through our document updating all the instances. There is a better way to do it. If you are familiar with Flash, you already know what I’m gonna say. In Freehand (and Illustrator) there is a panel called Library that can be used to keep frequently used elements.

To demonstrate the function let’s suppose we’ve designed a logo. Once it’s done we group it and drag it into the Library. You can rename it later if you want.

Let’s design stationary with our logo. Every time we need a copy of the logo for the different elements of the stationary we should drag the logo out from the library. Notice that the Library keeps count of how many times we used the logo in our document.

Now that we look at the whole document we realize that we are not happy with the logo. Instead of replacing all the instances of the logo with the redesigned one, we can simply double click the library item. A new window will open with the logo.

Let’s redesign the logo a bit and close the window.

Wow! All the instances of our logo have been automatically updated. That’s what I call productivity.

This is not a trick, but a function, which is overlooked by some Freehand users. It’s common to use the Window/Inspector/Documents palette for such operations, but there is a much better way to do it.

Select the page tool (the third arrow) in the toolbar (or just press D) and select a page. With this tool you can move around the pages by clicking and dragging them. If you press Alt you will make a copy of the page. Press Backspace and it will delete the page. It basically treats pages like regular objects.