10 Tips For Creating Lists in Mac Pages

Pages allows you to easily create a variety of different types of lists in your document. Knowing a few techniques and shortcuts can help you create even more complex lists that look exactly like you want.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some tips for getting the most out of Lists in Pages. 
In Pages you can create Lists, both a bulleted list and numbered list. To create a list you can select some text that already exists, like these five lines here. Then you can go to the Format Sidebar, under Style, and all the list options are at the bottom. If you don't see all these options here just click the little Reveal Button, next to the Bullet Lists. Now you can select one of the many styles here. Like, for instance, Bullet List, and now you get bullets here next to the items that were selected. But you don't actually need to do that.
You can automatically create lists by just typing. So, if you were going to manually create a list you would put a bullet first. A bullet character is Option 8 on US keyboards. Then a space and then you would type. Now when you do this and press Return it automatically converts what you typed to a list. You saw the indent change a little bit and also the next line includes the bullet. Now you can just type and press Return and it will add new items with bullets next to them automatically. It doesn't have to be bullets either. For instance, there are Dash Lists. So if I just type a dash and then something and then press Return it converts that to a Dash List and now I can just type each item, like that. The same thing with Numbered Lists. A typical numbered list starts with 1 and then period, and then a space. If you do that and then press Return it will convert that to a numbered list and you can see how it automatically put a 2 there and will continue. 
Now in addition to being able to create lists automatically just by typing the right things you can also stop a list automatically. So if you get to the end of a list and you don't want to continue to the next item just press Return a second time. Instead of inserting a new line it will just take that as a signal to stop the list and give you a regular line next for you to type something on. 
By the way, if you like these videos consider joining the more than 2000 others that support MacMost at Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com/patreon. 
Now when you have a list like this you may want to indent some of the lines. In other words this may not be five items but three items and these two are subitems under the first one. To do that you can click here with the number or bullet and drag to the right, like that. But you can also do it with just the keyboard. If you look under Format and then Text you'll see Increase Indent Level and Decrease Indent Level as Command and then the square brackets. So Command and right square bracket will indent and then Command and left square bracket will outdent. So, you can do that with multiple lines by selecting say two lines here Command and right bracket and Command and left bracket. But you can also just use the Tab key which is kind of what comes naturally. So with these selected I can press Tab and you can see they indent, Shift Tab will outdent. This is even more natural when typing. So here I've got the first line of the list and this is supposed to be a sub item so I will just Tab, go in and then type and it will stay at that level and then when I want to go back out I do Shift Tab to go back out and I type and it will stay at that level as well. 
Now I've already shown that you can use the Bullet and Dashes for lists. I can select these lines here and you can see there are a few other options. For instance there is a Bullet Big right here. But you also could just go down here and note that when you choose one of these what it is really doing is setting this to Text Bullets and then setting up the properties below. Here's the bullet. I can click here and then select other characters as bullets. Like, for instance, this Star or this special character, or a little triangle, like that. But this is a text field. I can actually type in this. So I can make anything I want. For instance, if I want the letter Q to be a bullet I can just type a Q in here, press Return, and you can see the bullets are now Q. I can even include multiple characters in here. So, for instance, if I wanted to use two greater than symbols I can. It  will put more than one character there. But you can also special characters there. So, I'm going to use Control Command Space to bring up the Emoji & Special Character Viewer and I can choose all sorts of special characters, emoji characters, symbols, and everything. So, for instance, I can just choose a little face like this and Return and you can see it's using the emoji character there. This is useful because there are actually a lot of special unicode characters that can be used as great bullets. So you can search for those if you happen to know the name of it. So, for instance, if I search for arrowhead I get a character like this and I can use that as a bullet. 
Now if you happen to use a special character and find that it is a little bit too big or too small you do have the size property right here. So if you want to make something a little bigger or maybe make it 110% to increase the size, or smaller maybe 60%. No matter what you choose you may find that the item doesn't completely lineup with the text on the right. So you can use the Align property here. I'm going to drop it down negative 1 and now it looks a little more centered. Also, note you can change the color. So it is just regular black right now but I can make it a different color, like blue like that. 
Another thing you can do is adjust the indentation. This is done here with Indent. The first property will actually move the entire bullet and text. The second one is the space between the bullet and text. The steps can be a little large so sometimes you're better off actually typing in here. Like I'll do .2 inches. I can use Command and right bracket to indent these two and I can make a different adjustment here. I can make this go further in, for instance, or have a different amount of space between the bullet and the text. It will just affect what I have selected here. It doesn't affect the other lines that aren't selected. 
But note you can also get away from text completely by using images. So I'm going to use Image Bullet here. Then I get the current image shown here. I can select from a variety of different images that are built into Pages. So, for instance, this gold star. But I can also choose any image I want. For instance I have an image file here. Something I just created on my own. I can click here and click Custom Image and then I can drag this in and open it. Now you can see it is using my custom image there. If it is not quite the right size, like before I can resize it, I can reset the alignment and everything. 
Now when dealing with Numbered lists you actually have a lot of different options. For instance, just look at the main styles here. You've got Numbered. You've got Lettered. You've got Roman Numerals for instance. If you have Numbers selected here you can actually select all these different styles here. You also have something called Tiered Numbers. So this is if you've got, say, some lines indented, like that. Now I'm going to select it all and I'm going to turn on Tiered Numbers. What will happen is I get numbers like 1.1, 1.2 and so on. You can select lots of different things here. Let's do Letters for instance. You can see how that goes. If I wanted to I can select just these two lines here and change these to just numbers and you can see now I get A.1 and A.2.
Another thing you may want to do is have lists that can continue after a break. For instance, here I'm going to go to the next line and then press Return again to stop the numbered list. Then I'm going to type some regular text. Now let's say I want to continue the numbered list here. It doesn't work if I just type, say, the next number and then something like that. It won't pick up that's a list because I'm not starting with 1. So what I'm going to do instead is start with 1 and then continue the list. So what I'm going to do is select just the first line. I'm just going to put the cursor in there. Then under Bullets & Lists there is an item here where I can Continue from Previous or Start From. So for this line only I'm going to say Start From 6 and now I get 6, 7, 8. So this line is Start From 6, the next line is Continue From Previous. Just like here automatically I had this one is Start From 1 and then every other line is Continue From Previous. 
Now let's say I've customized the list quite a bit. I'm using a special bullet character here with special color. I have indented the text. Set an alignment. Let's say I want to use that in other places as well. So let's say I start another list here. I'm going to just use a Dash just to get started and type out my list. Now I want this list to look like this list. You may already know that you've got Paragraph Styles and Character Styles in Pages. But a third type of style is List Style. So I'm going to select this List and then I'm going to go down here to where there are these predefined styles. I'm going to click the Plus Button here to create my own. So I'm going to call it My List. Here you can call it whatever you want. Now you can see I've got this special list. It even shows me kind of what it looks like. So now I can select this list here and I can now select the styles, go to My List and it will make it match this list. 
Better still let's say I've created three different lists throughout a 100 different pages of my book. I can go to this first list here and make a change. Let's say I want this to be green and I want it to be slightly bigger, for instance. So I can click here and then click Update and this will update the Style which means everywhere else the style is used it will update those lists. So watch this second list as I click Update. You can see it updates there as well. If there were 28 other lists they would all update. 
I have one last tip for you. That's creating a completely custom list that can't be defined by changing any of the values here. For instance, let's say you want a list that looks like this but you don't want that second period. It may look like there's no way to actually get that. Well, it is important to remember that Bullets & Lists really is misnamed. It shouldn't be Bullets & Lists. It should be Automatic Bullets & Lists because that is what it is doing. It's automatically creating these for you. If you want to manually create them and do anything you want, you can! 
The first thing I would do in that case is go to Pages, Settings and go to Auto-Correction and turn Off Automatically Detect Lists. So now when you type something like this it is not going to automatically convert it to a list. It is just regular text. So I can just continue to type and put whatever I want. If the next line is supposed to be 2.1 I can tab to go in, type 2.1 and then a space or an additional tab, and type whatever I want here. It is going to be up to me to define each line. So I'm going to have to tab in here, do 2.2, and all of that. Then here might be the next line, like that. So you can see how I can build whatever I want. I can select these and go to View, and then Show Rulers, and here's where I can set tabs so I can do the indentation if I want. So I can get really creative. It means I have to manually define each number. If I want to insert something here and now actually have to go and change all of these to match. 
So it is not a matter of Pages restricting you, it's only doing certain types of lists and you can't go outside of that. It is just that Pages has the ability to do automatically do certain types of lists but you can do anything else you want by manually typing exactly the characters you want to see.
So if you have used Lists in Pages I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 8 Responses to “10 Tips For Creating Lists in Mac Pages”

Sheldon

1 month ago

Thanks bunches

I know only two comments...but I wanted to reiterate how much I enjoy you revisiting past topics.

Roy Whelden

Great tutorial. Thank you!

Stephan Kiefer

very helpful. i like that you teach and not preach!

Judith Kernoff

4 weeks ago

You never cease to amaze! Great Tutorial!!

Jackie Bruno

I just watched your latest video and really enjoyed it! I love how you cover the basics and introduce advanced features in a way that's easy to understand. Even though I might not need some of the more advanced info right now, it's great to know it's there if I need it in the future.

You're a fantastic teacher, and I appreciate how you make complex topics feel accessible. Keep up the great work!

Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge! 😊

Clinton Hayes

Thanks Gary, that was awesome.
I use lists all the time and get frustrated having to fiddle around amending the bullet styles, not realising that I had all these options available to me.
Brilliant!

Michael Rodgers

3 weeks ago

That video is extremely helpful to me. I maintain a club charter that is essentially one very long complicated list. I have tried reading the Pages help regarding lists, but I could not figure out everything that you showed in the video, some of which will make the document look better and be easier to maintain. Thank you.