Adobe Fireworks
Basic Tips, Tricks, and Hacks

Hold down the Control key to move a textfield around while editing the textfield. This is great because you do not have to click outside the text box just to move the Text box around.

Holding space will temporarily switch to the hand tool (when not editing text, of course) and allow you to drag your document -- useful when you are zoomed far in. Holding space will also allow you to move selections and objects as you click-drag to create them, without releasing the mouse. Try click and drag to create a Rectangle, and before you release hold down space and move the mouse. Works in most image editing apps.

Press '2' to toggle Web Layer visibility on and off. Useful when you are slicing, and need to switch between seeing the design and creating an overlay slice.

When using the SCALE TOOL , if you want to scale objects ( scale up or scale down ) with symmetry, especially with dealing with circles and squares , while selecting the object, hold the SHIFT button while scaling them.

Holding space will temporarily switch to the hand tool (when not editing text, of course) and allow you to drag your document -- useful when you are zoomed far in.

Holding Ctrl + Space, click with the mouse then drag (without releasing) to define an area to zoom into. The same will work to zoom out if you hold Ctrl + Alt + Space.

Click on the color selector chip, then click again and hold the click. Now you can select colors outside of the Fireworks window (by releasing on your desired color). Useful for when you're obsessed with a color and don't know the values.

You can quickly access the system colour picker by pressing the spacebar when the FW colour picker is opened.

In order to create a perfectly vertical or horizontal gradient, you can use the bucket or gradient bucket tool and hold shift as you drag across selected elements; this will snap the gradient to 45 degree angles. You can also rotate an existing gradient by moving your mouse over the gradient bar(the line between the start and end handles), then shift+dragging around in a radial pattern. This is more useful when you want to reverse a gradient, as opposed to using the bucket to redraw and possibly change its length.

Use CTRL+C over an object and then CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+V in the desired objects to propagate a style with all its properties and effects. Very common tool and not everybody use these shortcuts.

Double-click a guide and you can enter a new value to move it. Doing this within a symbol positions the guides from the centre.

Holding Alt down while dragging something will automatically copy it of coarse alt+shift will copy and move it inline

Double-click the Crop tool to automatically have the Crop guides appear around the document. This is great when you need to quickly adjust the canvas size to make it larger!

In the Layers panel, if you have an object selected and change the blend mode, once you commit to the mode, you can use the up and down arrow keys to scroll through all the different blend modes.

One of my favorite time savers is to press Ctrl + forward/backward on the mouse scroll wheel for quick zooming in/out.

If you have a shape with a live effect attached to it and you want to mask that shape, you can group the shape with the live effect attached to it once; and then "group as mask" the the shape and the masking shape to keep the mask from inheriting the live effect.

In order to show the transform handles quickly for resizing objects using the handles, select the object and hit Q on the keyboard.

In order to pick a color outside of the Fireworks app, use the color picker popup in the Toolbar or Property Inspector. What you have to do is click and hold on the color chip. (do not let go or you will not be able to copy a color outside of fw app.

You can use PageUp and PageDown keys to move from one Page to the previous or next.

When your doing a critical project, always remember to Save copies, change the file name or something and /or save into another file. Why ? We know when we save the file, and quit fw, we can never redo the steps, so its better to be safe than sorry, sometimes fireworks has this nasty bug, that redo's from 10 - 20 steps earlier !

File > Import. Select the Image and your cursor will be a right angle. Now, before you click on the canvas to place the image, click and drag from top left to bottom right to scale the image. When you release, the imported image will be sized according to how you scaled it.

Select an object you wish to copy the style including the location of the gradient handles (Ctrl+C) and then Ctrl-Alt-Shift+V to paste the same attributes on a different object.