Centering in Affinity Publisher (Win)

[MikeA]

I've been taking a for-the-beginner online class in Affinity Publisher and have been following the presenter's suggestions about holding down Shift as I drag an object within a document, until the object reaches the center of the document. Then a colored guideline appears temporarily and I can snap the object to it. This works well if I'm moving objects vertically but not so well if I'm moving them horizontally. It's very easy—far too easy—for them to jump suddenly upward or downward during the horizontal moves. So when I ran across the Align Center and Align Middle controls in objects' context menus, I decided to start using those controls instead for precision. I have the feeling that if anything using the Wacom pen would be even less precise for this purpose than using a mouse.

•  Is there a command that permits you to center an object both horizontally and vertically in a single stroke, as it were? As I go through the class exercises I'm finding I need to do it often enough that a single command, handling both positioning commands at once, would be super-convenient.

•  Is there a way rapidly to center an object within another object without having to use the mouse? I've tried using the keyboard to "nudge" objects, but I find that when I do this, there's no visual feedback that I can see—no temporary guidelines that appear to mark centers or edges of objects (nor guidelines that appear to indicate the vertical or horizontal centers of the document itself).

[GarryP]

The SHIFT key, when dragging a layer, constrains the drag action to certain ‘planes’ – horizontal axis, vertical axis, 45-degrees, etc. - and is useful sometimes but it may be trying to override the spread (or other) snapping on certain occasions, depending on the placement of your layers.
See the attached video where I, first, use the spread snapping without the SHIFT key and, then, try it with the SHIFT key. Notice that using the SHIFT key stops me from being able to snap to the centre of the spread (the drag action follows the yellow line when using SHIFT).
Using SHIFT all the time could be making things worse for you.

[MikeA]

Now that I try it both with and without Shift, I see that you're right. Shift is interfering and I will rely less on it from now on. Thanks for uploading that video—explained it very well.

[GarryP]

You’re welcome.
The status bar at the bottom of the Publisher window tells you most of the things that the modifier keys (SHIFT, CTRL, etc.) will do and it’s worth reading it from time to time just to see if there is any extra functionality that might be useful.
Try putting the mouse pointer over various things at various times and seeing what the status bar says.
For instance, double-clicking on a handle in the middle of the bounding box sides will force the layer to be square, or holding down the right-button on the mouse while dragging a handle allows you to resize and rotate at the same time (attached video).
All sorts of goodies await those who look.

[MikeA]

That's a great tip, about double-clicking the side handles. I've been wondering about that. Had I but looked at the status bar...

Thanks again.