10 Mac Pages Tips

Here are some tips to help you take your Pages skills to the next level.
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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are ten useful techniques that you should know for using Pages on your Mac. 
Pages is the free word processor that Apple provides for your Mac. If you want to go beyond the basics here are ten techniques to try. 
First, when you create a new document in Pages you get a document that starts with you writing Body Text. If you want it to be different just change everything right away. So I'm going to change to a different Font here. I'm going to make it a little bigger. I can change other things as well. Let's make the text color a dark gray, for instance. Let's say I want this to be how my document starts. All you need to do now is Update the Body Style. Now I can go to File, and then I'm going to Save as Template. I'm going to save it to the Template Chooser, like this. I'm going to name it Blank 2. Now I've got this under here in My Templates. I'm going to go in Pages Settings and I'm going to set For New Documents Use Template, and change that template to this Blank 2 that's under My Templets like this. So now when I do File, New notice it starts an untitled document and notice the body text is the font, the size, and the color that I want. 
Now let's say I'm working on a document. So I do a little writing and then I Save. I'll use Command S to save and I'll save this to the Desktop, like that. Let's say I go and add another line, like that, and I use Command S to save again. Then another and Command S again and then another line after that and Command S. Every time I use Command S it saved a version of the document. Now let's say I Delete this line right here. Later on I decide this is an important paragraph and I want to get it back. So I can go now to File, and then Revert To and browse All Versions. When I do that I can go back to the previous version there and there is that text. I can actually select it in here and Copy if I want or I can use Restore to restore it to this version of the document. When you Close a document like this and then you open it again, like that, it still remembers these. I go to File and Revert To you can see I can even go back to my previous save after I've made changes I can browse all versions and go and find that paragraph that I accidentally deleted. 
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So in addition to being able to type math normally you can actually insert complex equations using Insert and then Equation. It can use either the LaTex or math ML syntax here to type something. So you can just type something like this and you can see what it will bring. But if you did something like, say, using the caret here to take 5 to the 7th power you can see that it actually builds the equation the way you would write it on paper. You can even use math symbols. Like for instance /int for integral and then you can type something there like that. So there's a lot of different things that you can do. Search for LaTex Math Reference and you'll find a bunch of different cheat sheets and guides for what you can use and what it will look like. 
Now however you add an image into a Pages document you can, of course, resize it and you can set its arrangement here like to stay on page or move with text. You can also Mask it. So, with an image selected you can go to Format and then look for Image and you can Mask the shape. It gives you a selection of Shapes here. For instance, let's use the rounded rectangle shape. You can see the shape is there now and this is the are that will be displayed when you click Done. If you stretch it or change any property of it, like I'll drag this little green dot here, you can change that. You can also resize it inside of the Mask. You can drag around to show a different portion and you click Done you can see now it's masked. You can even select it and then go to Format Style and if you apple a Border to that shape the border will be applied. Even a shadow will be applied there and you've got now a masked image with a border and a shadow. 
If you want to go with a shape that is not listed in the Menu you can use anything in here. So I'll go to Nature here. Bring up this tree shape and then I can drag and drop the image into the tree like that. You can see now I'm masking with this shape right here, like that. 
Now, of course, in a document you can select some text and copy it and then paste it somewhere else. But you can also copy not the text but the actual formatting. If you go to Format you'll see there's Copy Style, which instead of Command C is just Option Command C. So I can use that and then I can select some other text like that and use Option Command V and paste the style. It keeps the words but it brings in the font, the color, and everything else. Of course if you're going to do this a lot what you really want to do is investigate using both Paragraph Styles and Character Styles for this. 
If you need to see how many characters or words or paragraphs there are in your text you can go to View and then Show Word Count right there. Then you get words right here. But if you click on it you can switch to Characters without spaces, with spaces, words, paragraphs or pages. Any of these can be very useful when you're writing to keep track of how big your document is getting. You can also click and drag this Control and put it anywhere you want. So, you can put it here in the upper right hand corner, for instance, to get it out of the way. 
Here's a weird one. Let's say you need to put text throughout your document and you want to be able to change what that text is very easily and it will change throughout the document. You can do that using Tables. So I'm going to click here to create a Table and just create the simplest table here with no header, rows, or columns. So I've got that now and I'm going to reduce it to just being one cell, like this. Even shrink this down. I'm going to put whatever I want in here. Then I'm also going to with Format Table going to change the table outline to None. So it is basically just a textbox now. Except since it is an actual table I can use Formulas with it. I'm going to go to Format Arrange and have it stay on page so I can move it wherever I want. I'm going to Option Drag to create a second copy of this. In the second copy I'm going to change this text to a formula. I'm going to use equals but what I'm actually going to do is just have it reference this cell. You can see it says Table 1, A1. So now when I click the green button there it actually will echo whatever is here. If I change this to something else and then exit the table notice this will pick it up. I can actually make other copies of this and I can put them in different places throughout my document and whatever I change this to these will now reflect. It has all kinds of utility uses when creating documents. 
An interesting technique at the beginning of chapters and sections that you may see in books is to do something called Drop Caps where the first letter or the whole first word is larger than the rest. Just put your cursor somewhere here in the paragraph that you want and then under Format and then Style go down to Drop Cap. Turn that on and then you can pick from a variety of different styles here. So, for instance, I can use this one just like that. If you wanted to include more characters, like maybe the entire first word, you can do that as well or maybe it will only be two lines instead of three lines. There are a lot of other different options that you can see right here. You've got a lot of control. For instance I can turn on a background shaped like that. 
Now sometimes you may want to create charts like organizational charts or flow charts. Things like that. So I'm going to use a shape here, a rounded rectangle, and I'm going to set this to Stay On Page and now I'm going to Option Drag to create a few copies of it. I can actually enter text in here if I want. But what I really want to do is connect these with lines. So you can do that if you go to Insert and then go to Line and let's choose the right angle kind and it creates this. If I drag it into one of these shapes it snaps to it, like that. Let's insert another one, like this and I'm going to have this snap here and here. I can grab that green dot that's the middle part and guide it to how it should look. I can do something like this and then the cool thing is if I move these shapes the lines will stay connected like that. 
Now when you're working in Pages you have a page size. If I go to document here on the right I can see that it is US Letter. But I can change it to say US Legal or one of these other sizes. You can also create a custom page size. But you can't do it here. Instead you have to go to File and then Page Setup. Under Paper Size you can Manage Custom Sizes. In here you can create something unusual, I'll just call it Untitled. I can say I want it to be 7" by 7" and here are the margins and all of that. Say Okay. Now you can see it changes to Untitled. It shows you your custom sizes here at the bottom and I've got a 7 by 7 page.
So there are a bunch of tips that I hope you find useful. Thanks for watching.
Comments: 4 Responses to “10 Mac Pages Tips”

Sheldon
3 weeks ago
Thanks bunches
I so much enjoy when you review a basic topic as it reminds me of what I have forgotten
Steve Jones
2 weeks ago
Most useful. I'm never done trying to improve my pages skills. Thanks for this.
Cindy
1 week ago
Thank you Gary, this is super helpful!