Freehand used to have a great function for CTRL-R which was to repeat the last action.

If you're creating a row or column that needs to have the objects say .5 inches apart, you could do this any number of ways, such as a blend, or clone & flip.

In Freehand you would create the object, clone it and move it the correct distance. Then when you hit CTRL-R, it would duplicate the object again and move it that same distance from the last one. You could do this for however many number of times you need to create objects.

The other advantage of this is you can create objects in a circle by moving the center off of the original object and putting in a number for the move in degrees. So if you were to move the center off the original object and put in '36' degrees, and hit it ten times, you'd have the duplicates forming a circle. This is much faster than creating a blend and applying it to a circle and then making the circle line transparent.

http://www.sheff.com/xara/controlRepeat.jpg

If you had to do numbers in a circle, you could create the first number duplicate it and then edit each number to what you wanted it to be. This would be more accurate than typing text along a circle and then trying to space it out to line up with the object.