New Shapes in Pages, Numbers and Keynote

The new versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote introduce hundreds of new shapes that you can use in your projects. You can change the color of the shapes, resize them and even edit their lines and break them apart. They could be useful in a variety of documents, presentations and spreadsheets. This feature is also in the iOS version of Pages, Numbers and Keynote.

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

Video Transcript: So Apple has introduced some new versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote last week and there's a few new features. 
So I'm looking at the latest version here which is Pages 6.2 and let's take a look at some new shape features. Before we had shapes like squares, circles, triangles, talk bubbles, things like that. But now there's a sidebar here on the left. You can see there's all these different categories. 
So you can jump to another category, like say Objects, and there's all these different pieces of clip art. Now notice a few things about them. First of all they're all a single color. This is so they can work just like the circles and squares before and you can texture them in. Also if you scroll through them you eventually end up at the next subject. So you can see it goes from Objects to Animals. Well if I keep scrolling through I eventually end up at Animals. Then it goes down through Nature, etc. So you can jump around or you can basically just select an item here or scroll.
So these are kind of useful and neat. Let's take a look at some of them. Let's choose this one here. I can just click it and it inserts it in there. Like with all the other shapes before I can select it and drag the corners to enlarge it. I can move it around. It's a floating object on the screen. I can set a style for it here. So I've got the Format bar chosen. I can choose a different style there or just go down here and actually set the style. So I can choose a color fill. Go to the color wheel here and choose a specific color. I can also choose Gradient Fill. I can choose Image Fill too and choose from the various different types of image fills. You know its got this kind of textured look to it. You can also save styles here just like you could with the shapes before. So it really doesn't change any of the functionality. It's just a bunch of new shapes.
Now you can add text in here as well. It's a little tricky because some of these shapes aren't as simple as say a rectangle where you can add some text. So I can add some text in here and it kind of flows in a weird way but sometimes it ends up doing really well. Like in this particular shape the text does go here at the top and you can kind of create some sort of neat text there that defines the image a little bit better. But you've got to be careful because make it too big and it wraps around. Its probably not really not a good use for it. Probably you're better off actually putting a text box where you want it to be and, you know, just grouping these together after you get it exactly like you want.  Now it acts as one. But you do have that option. 
These shapes are also available in Numbers here. Numbers version 4.2 so you can add a shape here as an element. You can also do it in Keynote. So Keynote 7.2. So on a slide you can add a shape. This is where it might actually be a little more useful to punch up a keynote and add a shape there. Kind of across your slides to help you find them. A little bit useful in Numbers as well as you can use these to kind of punch up a spreadsheet or table. In Pages it's probably good as place holders. It's not going to replace clip art but it could be useful for some projects.
I do want to point out a couple of things. Here we've got still the pen tool which allows you to draw. Before that was included in here. So you can use that to draw shapes. Also, you can convert one of these shapes to something you can edit. You can Control click on it here and you can see that there's Make Editable and Break Apart. So Make Editable will allow you to edit some of the points on the shapes. So you can kind of make them your own. You can also choose Break Apart and now you've got individual shapes. So if you just wanted say a column here you can now get rid of the rest of this and use that one piece. 
So that makes them even more useful now instead of having just, you know, these shapes in here you've actually got subsets of all these shapes. So you could do a piece of something or alter something to your liking.

Comments: 2 Responses to “New Shapes in Pages, Numbers and Keynote”

John

7 years ago

You are the best and easiest Mac educator I've found, anywhere! Thank you!

Kurt L Hanson

Shapes created from Pages or Keynote then converted to icons for UI app applications with Affinity Designer, instead of drawing any unique shapes out myself, would be the ticket.

Comments Closed.

New Shapes in Pages, Numbers and Keynote

Comments: 2 Responses to “New Shapes in Pages, Numbers and Keynote”

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