InDesign Problem: Not Able to Move Selected Items

PROBLEM: Unable to move items with direct select tool in an InDesign existing layout.

I sat down to work with a client, just to reposition a few items on a rack card, and much to my annoyance I couldn’t move anything in the InDesign (CS 6) layout. I could select, but not move things. They behaved as if they were locked in place, which they were not. Rebooting the program did nothing, rebooting the whole system did nothing to fix the issue. Of course I had sent my client away with a promise to email them with discussed changes as soon as I got things working again.

SOLUTION: Reset InDesign Preferences – hold down Shift+Option+Command+Control while starting InDesign, click “Yes” to delete preference files.

Having done the immediately obvious steps to no success, I called a friend who works in prepress at a local printer and is super knowledgeable on software snafus. She said she had the exact same problem that morning as well – weird – but that reboot had fixed the issue. Drat. So onto the Adobe Forums I went and did find a reference to the same issue posted in 2010. Seemed like various things had been tried by people, but the one that had the most success was to reset the InDesign preferences. Yes, it did mean I had to reenter my preferences, but I was able to get the project back to the client and kept on schedule.