17 Pages For Mac Tips

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you some handy Pages tips.

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So when you choose File, New in Pages you get presented with a Choose a Template screen. If you're always choosing the same template, like the Blank template here, you can skip this by going to Pages, Preferences and then under General select Use Template for New Documents. You can select which template that you want to use. Once you have that set then going to File, New will instantly open up a new document with that template. You can always go back to the template chooser by holding down the Option key when you click the File menu. You'll see New Template Chooser is Option Command N.

Now let's say you want to highlight some text in your document. Let me highlight a few words here. So I've made three pieces of text green and bold. Now if I wanted to continue doing that throughout the document, always using green and bold, I can. But what if I changed my mind. What if I wanted it to be blue and bold or maybe a different font. I'd have to go through and change them all again. However, if you define a character style for this you can change them all easily. So let me select this first one here. You can see under Character Styles I can go and create a new one here and I'll just call this something like Special and let me make the rest of them the same character style.  So I'll choose Special for this one and Special for this one. 

Now if I ever want to change it I just select one, anyone I want, and change something about it. Like let's make it a blue. Now notice Special has an asterisk next to it. If I click it one of the things I can do is Update. If I hit Update it updates all the text using that character style with the new style.

Now you can also set keyboard shortcuts for these. You see if I move my cursor over Special here there's a little arrow there. I click on that and I get to define a Shortcut and I can define one of the F keys as a shortcut.  So let's say this is going to be F6. So now all I need to do is select another piece of text here and hit F6 and you can see it changes to that style. Depending upon how you have your System Preferences set you may have to hold down the fn key and hit F6.

Now let's say you decide you want to make some text all capitals. I could select this title here and retype it holding down the Shift key or using the caps lock key. But you could also go to Font, Advance Options which is this button right here and there you can change capitalization to All Caps. The advantage to using this is that it hasn't really changed your text. It still knows that the letters A, I, and W are capital letters and the rest are lower case. It's just changing how they look. So if I wanted to go back here and change from All Caps back to None it'll remember which ones are capital letters and which ones are lower case letters.

So this is one of my favorite tips in Pages. I hate when you have text that doesn't have some sort of spacing between paragraphs. You can see here there's a paragraph and there's a paragraph but the lines are the same space apart between paragraphs as they are the lines inside the paragraphs. But if I were to select All, Command A, and go down here to Spacing I could increase Before Paragraph and After Paragraph as much as I want. So I can add some space between paragraphs. See how much nicer that is to read. Now even if you don't want your document to look like this in the end I find it's much easier to write when you can clearly see each paragraph. Then once you've got your writing complete and you're going to print or create a pdf you can select All and easily zero this out to get rid of the spaces.

One of the things that people like to complain about with Pages is that every time you bring new artwork in for images it gives you the default option. So default borders, default arrangement, and everything like that. But you can get around that using Copy and Paste. So here I have an image here. I've set a Custom style for it. I've set an Arrangement for it. You can play with things like Spacing. All sorts of stuff like that. Now if I wanted to repeat that for another image the key is not to bring that image in new but instead select this image here, Copy it, then go to where I want the new one to be, Paste this one in. Then I go to Image for this one and hit Replace. When I do that I can  simply select a new image and it will put that one in there. It keeps all the same arrangements and styles. So if you have a whole bunch of images that you need to bring into your document copying and pasting and replacing the image is the way to go.

Let's say you want to have a kind of default styles and arrangement settings for images. One way to do this is to create a document just to store some of these with all the things like you want and then Copy and Paste from that document. So I have another document open here and you can see I have an image there with everything setup like I want. I have a text box also setup with everything the way I want. The font, the alignments, and everything like that. I can just Copy and Paste these elements from this document. I can keep adding more and more pages of different elements to this document over time.

Speaking of copying and pasting if you were to copy something from this document, another document or a website, whatever, and paste it in you're going to get Styles. So if I paste this in here you see I get that word there bold and colored and all of that. If instead you want to paste and have it conform to the style that's currently in use in the document you can do that by choosing Edit, Paste and Match Style or you can see Option Shift Command V. That will then just use the current style of whatever was going on where that cursor was.

Likewise you could do the opposite by selecting text and going into Format. You can Copy Style. Then you could select something else and then you can do Format, Paste Style and the text will remain but the style will be replaced with whatever you copied. 

Have you ever typed names or special words that seem to be auto corrected all the time or at least pointed out as being spelled incorrectly. You can add to a dictionary of words for Pages to ignore by going to Pages, Preferences. Go into Auto Correction and there's this Ignore Words button. Here you can add all sorts of words to this list and they won't be autocorrected nor will they appear with a red light on them saying they've been misspelled. While we're here notice that you've got a special Text Replacement section here. This is like the system wide one that you'll find in System Preferences under Keyboard. But this is specific to Pages.

Sometimes when we're working with images we'll bring in a photo and the photo is huge. It's a high resolution image but it's going to be shrunk down and then just printed or included in a pdf. You may not want to include a 5 or 10 megabyte image there when something much smaller will do. You can go to File then Reduce File Size. What it will do here is scale down large images. So it looks at the size of the image on the page. It will then make a new copy of it inside with compression so that the file size won't be too big.

Now what about hyphenation? You can turn on hyphenation in your document by going to the Document sidebar and then looking for Hyphenation at the very bottom. Turn that on and you can see some words are hyphenated like this word here just got hyphenated. Now you can select any text you want after doing that. Like say this one paragraph and then go to Format and then go to More. Then you can specify that you don't want that particular paragraph to obey that hyphenation option.

Now if you're working on a document and other people have access to your computer's account then you may want to save it with password protection. So you can do that by going to File, and then Set Password. Here you can set a password. Once you set the password not only can't you open the document without the password but the document is encrypted. So nobody can kind of hack their way into it.

There's a whole set of ClipArt inside of Pages. You can go to Shapes and you can choose all these different shapes here. They're all a single color and they come in pretty handy. But you have another set of ClipArt that you may not even think about. That's all the Emoji. I mean there are hundreds of different emoji and they cover a lot of different subjects. So if you wanted to insert something here you could always do Control Command Space, bring up the Emoji viewer and search for something and then insert that in. Then you can even make that pretty large. So you go to Style here and you could bring it up to a certain size. So let's do say 90 here. If you get too big you start to see the pixels in there. You could also take that and then put that into a text box here and then basically have it be its own element just like an image that you can then move around on the page.

Now a lot of times when we write we want to know the word count total. So you can go to View, and then Show Word Count. At the bottom here you can see the number of words. Click on that and you'll see things like how many pages it spans, paragraphs, characters with and without spaces.

One last thing I want to show you that is kind of neat. A lot of times when we have titles like this we do all sorts of things to make them stand out. We can make them bold. We can change the color. We can change the font. But another thing you can do is you could change the character spacing. So here under the Advanced Options under Style you can change character spacing to be a percentage and you can see how I can increase just ever so slightly the spacing here just to make this title stand out a little bit more from the rest of the text.