I’ve got a weird little problem, have been using workarounds for a couple of years, but there must be a better way.
If I make a file within a project, and want it, say, at the bottom of a line of files and folders, I drag it down to the bottom - but then it insists on placing itself within the lowest folder.
In theory, I should be able to drag it to the left and thus convince it that it’s a standalone file. But when I do that, sproinggg, back it rebounds to where it was - a sub-file within the bottom folder.
You might just not be dragging far enough left or might be dragging too far left. When you drag items in the binder, a line appears at the place where the item will move and the containing folder for where the drop will place the item gets circled. So if your item is currently a subdoc of folder A, which is a subdoc of Draft, you can drag your item a bit to the left and still have Folder A circled, meaning it will be placed as a subdoc at the bottom of Folder A. Drag a little further and Draft will get the circle, so now you’ll be really placing the item outside of Folder A and as its own item in the Draft. If you yank the item so far left that there’s no circle and there’s no line showing where the item will get placed, then the item isn’t actually going to move at all. If you get a line and no circle, then the item will move out to the top level of the binder (ie, same level as the Draft, Research, and Trash).
So in the image here, the document will move so that it’s inside the Manuscript folder (circled) and just below the Chapter 1 folder but not inside it (where the green line is).
If you don’t have the preference in Navigation set so that Option-drag creates duplicates in the binder, you can hold the Opt key while dragging to disable dropping onto other documents, but you’ll still be able to drop into folders and doc groups, so I don’t think that will help you so much here. What you might find easier is to use the shortcut keys Ctrl-Cmd-Up/Down/Left/Right to move the selected document–if you bump it left, it will move out of its containing folder and be placed directly beneath it in the binder. You could also try using the context menu to Move To a specific location.
