7 Skills You Need To Master Mac Pages

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are the seven skills you need to master Mac Pages. 

It's fairly easy to get started with Mac Pages and begin writing anything from articles to reports to books or newsletters. But if you really want to master Pages it's important to know how these seven things work. 

For instance, it's important to know that there are two different modes for Pages. It's kind of like two Apps in one. One mode is Word Processing Mode. The other is Page Layout Mode. They're two different types of documents. You either are working in a word processing document or a page layout document. You can see these when you're selecting a template. Most of these are Page Layout templates. But some of them are Word Processing documents. Like the blank template here is word processing. Whereas blank layout is a blank layout document. 

Let's select the word processing document here and now we're in Word Processing Mode. We can tell in a few ways. The first is we can go to View and then Show Layout. We can see here that there is a textbox that we're already typing in. This only happens in Word Processing Mode. In Page Layout Mode it is a totally blank canvas and you have to add objects to it. Also notice if you go to the Document settings here and you look for Document Body you can see that is turned On. That's this body text here. If you go to File and look for Convert you'll see you can convert this to Page Layout because it is currently a Word Processing document. If it was a Page Layout document it would say convert to Word Processing. 

The main different between the two, like I mentioned, is that Page Layout mode works like a canvas with every page a separate thing. Whereas Word Processing mode has this textbox that not only allows you to type text immediately, but as you type text here and you continue down past the end of the page it creates a new page automatically. The textbox continues on that next page. In fact if you use a sidebar here with Page Thumbnails you'll see these pages. If I delete this line here you can see it goes back to just one page. But if I add a line here at the end it continues on the next page automatically. I can continue writing for three, four, fifty, a hundred, or a thousand pages in Word Processing Mode without ever needing to manually add a page. This textbox just flows from one page to the next. 

But if you use Page Layout Mode, like by selecting the Blank Layout template here, then there's nothing on this page. Even with Layout shown you'll see there's nothing here. If you want to put text here you've got to create a Textbox, like that, and then add text to it. But this textbox is just the size that you make it. It won't automatically continue onto another page. If you want to add another page you need to Insert Page and it will create a new one here. 

The next thing you need to master is using Paragraph Styles. I'm going to create a new Word Processing document and I'm going to type some text. So now you can see I've got this text here and it is using a certain font at a certain size, a certain color, and style. If I were to put my cursor anywhere in this first paragraph here it will show me in the right sidebar under Text that I'm using Body Text. These are paragraph styles here. You can see you get a bunch by default. So now that I'm using Body Text here if I were to change this paragraph, let's go ahead and make it a different font, like for instance let's do Times here and maybe make it a little bit bigger, you could see now that I'm using Body Text but with an asterisk. That means it's Body Text but modified. But I could use this button here to Update the Body Text style. These other paragraphs are also using Body Text, but they haven't been altered. By updating the Body Text style it automatically updates all of the paragraphs using that paragraph style. When I click update notice all of the paragraphs now update to use that. I can do that over and over again. So, for instance, if I wanted to change the color here to make it something like this, I need to make it Bold text like that, and I Update Body Text, it updates all of the paragraphs with Body Text. You can also create your own. So I can take this paragraph here, let's use a different color here, and let's instead of updating Body Text we'll go and create a new paragraph style with the Plus button here and we'll call this an aside. Now this is different than the rest. If I were to take this paragraph here and switch it to this style, you can see I've got these two, and I can update them as I want. So I'll update this one to use that color and I'll update that style here and you can see how it updated just the paragraph using that style. 

It is important when you start writing to recognize that you're using Paragraph Styles and use them wisely. Once your document is very long, you'll be able to easily change the properties of any style and have it apply across the document. 

Now paragraph styles apply to entire paragraphs and thus they can do more than just change the font and color. They can also do things with line spacing and such. Character Styles are the same basic concept but they apply only to the character selected. So, for instance, if you select a single word here and you change it, say making it Bold, making it Italic, and maybe making it a different color, like that, I can now use that as a Character Style. You can see by default the character style is set to None. I can click here, add a new Character Style here. So, for instance, I can just name this test. Now I can select another word or words or characters and I can apply that same character style to this. I can do it in another spot as well. Anytime I want I can select some of that, change something about it, let's change the color there, and then also Update that style. Notice how it changes it in the other places where I'm using that character style. So again, if you start using Character Styles early when you're writing your document you can find that you can easily change things throughout even a long document by just accessing and updating those character styles. 

Now word processing documents aren't only about text. Sometimes we add objects or even images to them. So you click here, for instance, and add say a shape or I could go and insert media. Let's insert an image here by choosing one from our photo library. I'll choose this one here, for instance, and it adds it here. I can easily grab it and resize it. But how does this move with the document. For instance, if this is supposed to be with this paragraph here, you could see if I add text above it moves nicely with it. To determine how this image or other objects moves with text you need to select it and go to the Arrange Sidebar here. Now, you've got the ability to say you want it to stay with the page. So not be associated with the text, but the actual page it is sitting on, or move with the text. You also here can set how text wraps around it. 

One of the options here is to actually have it inline with text. So it actually appears like a character between letters in your text, which is very useful. You can move it around and place it between paragraphs, like this. Even putting blank lines around it. This gives you very simple control over where it appears. It's inline with the text. Whereas if you just have it in one of the other modes here it's kind of using this anchor and you can see the anchor here as this little blue dot with a line going down. So you can determine exactly what text this image is anchored to. There are lot of different text wrapping options and a lot to consider when deciding on stay on page or move with text or inline with text. So I encourage you to experiment with a sample document. Master how object placement and text wrapping work in order to master Pages. 

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Now if you want to number your pages it's fairly easy in word processing mode. Just go down to the Footer here, you'll see it as three boxes, or you can also go to the Header of the page. You can click in anyone. One of the options you're going to get is Insert Page Number. So it is fairly easy to be able to do that. I'll just do a simple number there and then you'll notice it is on every page. But what happens if you don't want the page numbering to be sequential. Like, for instance, you want there to be a page break here, I'll insert a page break, and then this starts not page 5 but page 6 because you want to insert something in-between these two pages. 

Well, you can do that using Sections. Let's go and instead of inserting a page break there we'll insert a Section Break. So now you've got a new section here. It doesn't seem to be any different but when you go to the right sidebar here, go to the Document View,  and then Section. Now you can have the page numbering for this section start at something different. So I'll start, say, at page 6 here. So now this section goes 1 to 4 and this section goes 6, 7, and on. Another thing about sections is when you look at the thumbnails here you'll see that Sections can be moved whereas pages can't. Remember in word processing mode the text flows from one page to the next. You can't simply move page 3 before page 2 because the text is flowing between them. But you can move Sections. So you can have a section here and you can move that separately. So you can have single page sections, multiple page sections, and move them around to change the order of your document. Sections could be chapters or they can be parts of chapters or really anything you want. 

Now most of the things we talked about so far have to do with word processing mode. But here's one that has to do with Page Layout Mode. If you create something in Page Layout Mode you're basically creating, say, a newsletter or brochure or a sign. You just have individual pages. Each page is its own separate canvas. You can easily add pages, like that, and have two pages here. But what happens if you want to put text on a page, like here, and then you insert text that is going to be more than what can fit here. A fairly common thing to do in a newsletter. So you've got this text here but it needs to flow to another textbox. You can create a second textbox, like this, and have this text flow from here to there by simply clicking on these little colored circles at the top of the textbox. Click here, for instance, and now it assigns the color green and the number 1 to this textbox. If I click here it will assign the color green and the number 2. So it flows from 1 to 2 using the same color. This doesn't even to be on the same page. I can drag this down to page 2 and put it here and the text will flow from this box on page 1 to this box on page 2. You can click on the little colored number there and you can create a new thread, remove this box from a thread and do various other things. You can connect box after box after box. It's an important skill to know whether you're creating newsletters, brochures, or any kind of page layout document. 

Now finally the last and perhaps the most important skill you need to master is the ability to create templates. For instance here I created a document and it has a custom title paragraph style. It's got custom body text style. You may even have custom character styles, for instance. You may have set custom margins. You may have, for instance, defined the page numbers and all of that. If you need to create documents just like this all the time you can create a template from this. Now, anything you have in the document, when you create a template is going to be part of the template. So you may not want to have all of this text here. I'm going to select it all and get rid of it. But, it's still going to retain the paragraph styles here, the character styles, and other properties of the document even though it is starting off blank. Or, perhaps you may always start with a little bit of text here, as the title, and then maybe a little bit of text here as the first paragraph. However you want to do it. 

Now you go to File . You can save it as a file and then double click on that file to create a new document using that template. But you can also just add it to the Template Chooser. The Template Chooser is this. It's what you get when you start a new document. Notice the last category here are My Templates. You can name this anything you want and it's now there as a template. You create a new document from this. You could see how it includes your sample text there but more importantly it includes the styles that you defined here. So you don't have to start from scratch all the time. 

Of course you can also create very complex Page Layout document templates to use for newsletters, brochures, and things that you find you're always kind of repeating yourself with a series of documents.

So if you want to master Pages I hope this video acts as a to do list for the skills you should work on. I've got other videos on how to do all these different things and a whole course on Pages that talks about them as well. Thanks for watching.