Mac Tips: Pages for Mac: best tips

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Apple's Pages is a solid starting point for anyone looking to do a little writing or page layout, and while the program is pretty simple, it packs more of a punch than you might think. As evidence, we present the following 13 tips, which are sure to turn you into a word-processing pro.

1. Add a watermark to every page of a document

Just to set your levels of expectations for this tip, we haven't uncovered a way by which Pages can add a real watermark to your documents – that is, a design that becomes visible when you hold the paper up to a light. No, this just adds a light-colored graphic automatically to every page of a word processing document – perhaps a company logo or the word "Confidential."

Prepare your graphic, and if you're doing anything even remotely complex, the easiest way to do it is in a page layout document rather than a word processing document (even though you'll eventually use it in the latter). So, create a new document, choose the Blank template, and then immediately click File > Convert to Page Layout. Now prepare what you want in the watermark. It might just be the word "Draft" or a more involved design. Once you're done, select everything, group it (from the Arrange menu), and then copy and paste it into your word processing document.

When you do this, don't worry if all the text moves around. With the graphic still selected, click the Format button (top right of the document window), then make sure Stay on Page (not Move with Text) is selected, and drop the Text Wrap option down to None.

Get it to the right position and size (perhaps setting it to a jaunty angle), then tweak its opacity. For this you'll probably need to ungroup complex objects so the Style tab shows up to enable you to drag the opacity slider down. Immediately after, group everything again so you can't break your design by dragging something out of place. The last step is to select Arrange > Section Masters > Move Object to Section Master. Your watermark now appears on every page. If you need to tweak it afterwards, select Make Master Objects Selectable from the Arrange > Section Masters menu.

2. Make a letterhead appear on every page of a document

You can use a similar technique to add a company logo and address to every page of your correspondence, and one advantage of using the Section Master feature is that the page elements appear to be completely "burned-in" on the pages, and people can't move them around. You just have to omit the opacity tweak step from the watermark technique. It's easy to distribute a template and default to it when you're starting new documents, too – read on!

3. Export and import templates

Lots of what we'll show you in these tips is helpful in setting up standard, reusable templates so that you won't need to do the same work over and over again. Once you've set up your styles, letterheads, and so on, you can easily share the template with others just by selecting File > Save as Template. You'll be given the option of adding it to your Template Chooser – the gallery of options that pops up when you create a new document – or saving the file externally so you can share it with others. Your recipient should just double-click the ".template" file, and they'll be given the option of adding it to their own Template Chooser.

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4. Create media placeholders

If you frequently update images in a document – like, if you're a teacher with a lesson plan template, or a real estate agent creating listings sheets – you should use Media Placeholders. With these, you create drop zones on a page, onto which you can drag new images. Images are immediately scaled and cropped to the correct size and have any object styles applied to them. Set an image how you want it to look (with crops, borders, reflections, and so on), then choose Format > Advanced > Define as Media Placeholder. New images can be dropped onto this, and scaled and moved within it. Optionally, save as a template.

5. Set a default template

If all you ever use Pages for is standard word processing documents, you're probably sick of creating a new document and then having to pick Blank from the Template Chooser. Go to Pages' preferences and you can specify what template it should use when you press Command + N. This could be the Blank template, one of the more fancy ones, or your own custom template. But what if you then want a different template? Easy: just hold down Option after you've clicked the File menu, and you'll see that New changes to "New from Template Chooser…" Alternatively, press Option + Command + N.

6. Define capitalization

See that little cog in the Text pane of the Format sidebar, next to the buttons for Bold, Italic, and Underline? There's also an option for capitalization in there. Select some text and you can force it to uppercase, for example. Note that the mixed or lowercase text you typed is still stored behind the scenes, and Pages merely displays it in whatever style you chose for capitalization. This is especially handy with Styles. You might have a style for captions which is set to All Caps, but if you change your mind and change that option, then — so long as you wrote in mixed case to begin with — words such as "THIS" will automatically change back to "This."

7. Apply styles with a keyboard shortcut

You can apply styles quickly by pressing Function keys. In the sidebar, click the downward-pointing disclosure triangle next to the style name, then hover to the right of the style you want to associate with an F-key. Click the rightwards-pointing chevron that appears, and pick an F-key under Shortcut in the pop-out menu. On Macs that don't have dedicated F-keys, hold the fn key and tap the corresponding number key on the top row.

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8. Define (and tweak) text styles

Most of us tend not to bother with styles – collections of characteristics such as font, size, line spacing, and so on that govern, say, how a paragraph of text looks – but it's something worth getting your head around. Not only do styles make your documents look more consistent, but they make it easier to change your mind later on.

Let's say you define the subheading style as bold, 14pt tall, and colored red. With that style applied to all your subheadings, if later you decide that italic, 16pt, and blue text would look better, you just need to update the style once and all your subheadings will change without you having to go through your document and laboriously update each of them one by one.

Your Pages documents will have a range of styles already, and it's easy to tweak them to suit you. Type a headline, select it, then apply the Title style from the Format sidebar. Now change all the formatting options you want. As soon as you make any change, you'll see "Title" change to "Title*" in the list, indicating that the current text is based on the Title style but doesn't use it exactly. You'll also see an Update button. When you're done, click this, and the style is then redefined, and the appearance of any text with that style applied to it is updated to reflect your choices.

You can also add completely new styles. Format some text as you wish, then click the downward-facing disclosure triangle next to the style name, click the + symbol in the top right corner of the pop-up that appears, and give your new style a suitable name.

9. Cascading styles

If you always switch to your Body style after using a style you've created called Pullquote, for example, you can have Pages switch automatically for you.

While on a piece of text formatted with Pullquote, click More in the Format sidebar, and ensure Body is selected for the Following Paragraph Style option.

10. Configure live word and character count

It's not particularly obvious, but Pages does have live word count, which you can activate from the View menu or button. Once it's showing, you can click it to see other statistics about your text or selected text, and from that menu switch which stat is always visible. You can also drag the word count anywhere on the page, and it will snap to the horizontal center.

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11. Customize the toolbar

This often-forgotten trick works in lots of apps, but it can be especially useful in iWork to set up your workspace with the tools you use most often, and dispense with those you don't. Right-click the toolbar at the top of a Pages window and choose"Customize Toolbar." Drag features you use often onto the toolbar, drag out those you don't, and rearrange and group the buttons using spaces and flexible spaces.

12. Adjust spacing between characters

Professional designers frequently tweak the spacing between characters, especially in headlines and titles, in order to D O E F F E C T S L I K E T H I S or to tighten things up. Although you don't have fine-grained kerning control between two characters in Pages, you can tweak the spacing for a word or more from the cog menu next to the Bold, Italic, Underline buttons in the Format sidebar.

13. Create custom bullet points

You probably know that Pages' controls for bulleted and numbered lists are rich with options, but unless you've really dug into them you may not realize quite how much flexibility they give you. One of their best tricks is the ability to use anything you like as a bullet point for each level of bullets. If you choose to use Text Bullets, you can replace the "•" with any character you can type – including emoji! Just hold Control + Command and press the spacebar, and browse or search in the Characters palette. Alternatively, switch to Image Bullets and you can use any graphic stored on your Mac – a small element of a company logo, perhaps?

September 01, 2015 at 05:47AM
Christopher Phin