Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Killer Tips

There are several ways to skin a cat. There are also several ways to scale an object. Typically, you select it and use the Free Transform Tool if you just want to be able to scale freely and by sight alone. There are those out there, though, that want to be precise and exacting.

To scale any object by a percentage amount that you can type in, open your Transform panel (CTRL-T), if it's not already open. Now select the object in question. You'll see that you can now input precise percentages in the Transform panel to scale the object up or down at will. Check the Constrain box to make sure that the horizontal and vertical scale percentages remain proportionate. This method can be helpful if you want to make sure you have one instance that is exactly half the size of another. Using Free Transform would make it pretty hard to tell.