Using Special Viewing Modes With Pages, Numbers and Keynote On iOS

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to use Reading View in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote on your iPad or iPhone. Also, Presenter View in Pages.

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In the middle of last year Apple added a new feature to Pages, Numbers, and Keynote but only for iOS. So only on the iPhone and iPad. When you go into Pages when you're viewing a document the default is to be in something called Reading View. Reading View allows you to view the document and use elements in the document, like image galleries and videos and such, but you can't edit the document. You can't make any changes. You know you're in Reading View if you see the Edit button here at the top right. The Edit button is what allows you to get out of Reading View. While you see that Edit button anything you do in here, like for instance you can select text and Copy it, Define it, but you can't change it. There is an Edit button here as well which allows you to exit the Reading View mode and go into Edit View. So whether you use this button here after selecting something or this button it changes to the Normal View that you see when using Pages. You can do everything that you normally do in Pages when in this normal view. You'll have this button up here in the upper right hand corner. Click that and get back into the Reading View. 

So there are two different useful things when it comes to Reading View. One is you could distribute Pages documents to other people using iPhones and iPads. Let's say students will have iPads. They would by default be in Reading View which is better for actually consuming content. If you created a complex Pages document that has text and images and all sorts of things in it, then they could go through it, read it, and not accidentally make changes. After all when you're in regular mode it's very easy to select something and make a change. You're editing a Pages document. But Reading View allows you to view what's there and use it kind of as a document viewer which would be much better in a lot of cases. The other good thing about this is it makes it easier for you to be able to review your document on an iPhone or iPad without accidentally making changes. 

Now you also have the same Reading View in Numbers and Keynote. So let's go into this Numbers document here and you could see I've got that same Edit button up here. I can easily view the information here. But if I want to make changes I need to tap there and now I'm in regular mode. The same thing in Keynote. You can view the presentation but you have to switch to regular mode to edit it. Now note when you're in  Reading View mode there are still things that you could do. For instance for a presentation you can Play the presentation. You could also click on the three dots button there and you have other options that don't involve editing. For instance Sharing, Exporting, Printing. You can Search. Things like that. The same thing in Pages and Numbers. You can tap on this button here and you've got your Sharing, Exporting, Printing, Searching options all right here available whether you're in Reading View or in the Regular editing mode. 

Now while we're talking about special modes Pages has another special mode you should know about. It's called Presenter Mode. You could find it here. You can get to it from Reading View or from the regular editing mode. If you select this it takes you into something that looks actually a little bit like Reader View in Safari. But what it actually is is it's taking the text from a word processing document, and this only works in a word processing document not in a page layout document, and it puts it in the type of mode you would need if you were a presenter reading off of a teleprompter. But it is also useful if you just want to read the text in a Pages document. It puts it in this different mode so you can just focus on the text. It gets rid of a lot of the other stuff that's there. You can tap here and change the font size, you can change the background color, change the font. There are other text options as well like going to all caps or adding line spacing and margins. You could also Auto Scroll. So with Auto Scroll turned on you could set a speed here and then you could just tap in the document and it will start scrolling up. So if you are actually trying to use your iPad like a teleprompter you can actually use this to set the speed for what you want and it will scroll up.

Now this isn't like one of those advanced teleprompter apps where it's actually going to hear your voice and advance according to where you're at. It's going to scroll at a constant speed. So if you actually want to use this feature as a teleprompter it's important to space things out so that you don't kind of slow yourself down or speed yourself up unintentionally by having a very dense paragraph followed by say several lines with one word each. That kind of thing. You could easily use this little scrolling bar on the right here to move around whether you're automatically scrolling or you're just doing it on your own. It also works if you just tap and scroll with your finger. 

You can use Done to exit this mode and go back to whatever mode you were in before.

So here was a look at some different ways to view documents in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. I think these are really useful. I'd love to see them implemented on the Mac as well. Except on the Mac it's not quite as needed because it's much easier to actually view a Pages document without accidentally editing something on it using a mouse and keyboard than it is when you're using a touchscreen. But still for consistency and for use in a classroom type setting I would love to see Apple add a Reading View to the Mac versions of these apps also.