Moving an object in Maya is very simple. All you need to do is drag the object in different directions until you are happy with it's position. Here I explain how we do it.

Switch to the four-view panel display mode in Maya, by pressing and releasing the 'spacebar'. The four-view mode will help you to understand how the movement affects the different panel's views. Now click on the cube to select it in Maya.

In the toolbar below the main-menu in Maya, we have to make sure that the current selection mode is in object-type and not component-type as shown in the image. (The object type is the one at the middle with the mouse pointer over it and is depressed in the image. If your selection is not in object-type, click on the object-type button to switch to that mode)

Note: The object-type selection mode in Maya lets you select an object as a whole, whereas if you switch to the component-type selection, the currently selected object's components (vertices etc) will be displayed and you can select those components. We will see it's application later.

The reason why I asked you to switch to Four-view mode in Maya before starting with transformations is for you to observe how the transformations reflects in the various panels. When you transform an object in the scene, it get's reflected in all the panels in the corresponding directions in Maya. Moving an object along the Z axis may reflect as a downward movement in the Top panel. But it may get reflected as the movement along another direction in the other panels.

The easiest way to figure out this difference is by looking at the axis markings at the bottom left corner of each panel window . It shows the direction that each axis represents in that specific panel.

Note: You can see a bigger circle (yellow colored) surrounding the cube in the figure above. This circle allows you to rotate the object along your current view's plane of rotation instead of your object's local axes of rotation in Maya. Just try clicking and dragging your mouse on that outer circle. You will see that the box rotates along all the three axes, because the current view (persp view) is not parallel to any of the axis. This manipulator in Maya lets you rotate the object with respect to your current angle of view plane, and is very useful at times.