Using Styles In Pages

You can use paragraph and character styles to manage the attributes of your text in a Pages document. You can use the built-in styles, or create your own. When you change some text, you can create a new style and then use it throughout your document. You can then update the text that uses that style in one place.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using Styles in Pages.
Using Pages, version 5 we're going to take a look at Styles.
I've created a basic blank document here in Pages and we are going to look at how I can apply styles to different paragraphs. Let me add some text to this document. Then we want to look at the style for this text here. The way we do that is to hit the Format button here. This brings up the Inspector on the right side of the window. You have two modes for the Inspector; Format and Setup. So make sure you are in Format. Then you have the cursor there, you can see it blinking. It is going to show you information about the text that the cursor is in.
It is going to show you the Style. You can select another style. There is a whole bunch of defaults. You can also then change very specific things about the style; say the font, the alignment, the line spacing, things like that.
So to change the style let's first select an entire paragraph here. Then we are going to change something about it. For instance, let's change the font size. I'm going to make it larger here. I'm going to up the point size. You see as soon as I start changing it I got this Update button here. That is basically asking me to update the Body style to be this new set of criteria here. So if I were to do that you can see it updates everything else because everything else was set to body style. So let me undo that, Command Z. 
You can see here this is set to body style with an asterisk after it meaning it's based on body style but has made some modifications to this specific paragraph. I can also click here and, in addition to being able to just switch to another style, I can hit the plus button and I can name the style something. So let me just name it Test 1. Now you can see there is no asterisk there. This paragraph is Test 1. If I put the cursor in it it says Test 1. If I put the cursor in the second paragraph it says Body.
Now if I were to select this third paragraph here and change it to Test 1 you can see it matches this. Better still, if I were to decide that I want all the paragraphs that are Test 1 style to be something different, say a little smaller, I can reduce the size of this. You can see I just did that and it only did it here to what was selected. Now it says this is Test 1 modified. I can update Test 1 and it will apply it to everywhere Test 1 was which, in this case, was also the first paragraph.
If I wanted to I could remove this style that I created here. See there is this little right arrow there and I can say Delete style. And it is going to say, hey wait a minute you are using this one. So everything that was Test 1 style should now be marked and I can change it back to Body. Now this all matches.
So I can go in Body and I can select just one word here in Body and I can change it. Let's change the Font. Then oh I like that and I want to apply that to everything that style body and now I can click here, go to Body, and Update style. It didn't give me the Update Style button there because I only changed one word out of a paragraph. If I changed the entire paragraph then it would have given me the button. There we go. Now everything in body style is now updated to be this new style here.
So these are what are called paragraph styles. So they effect the entire paragraph. If I select this entire paragraph here and I change its line spacing like that and I update it, it will update all the paragraphs like that.
There are also character styles. You can just see them right here. There is just this one little item. Character styles are things that don't include like justification, spacing and such. Things that only are font issues. So I can basically select a word and say I want to make that Bold and Underlined and maybe change the color to something. Say I want to use that style there to highlight words.
Well, I can select that and see that in character style I am using no character style but modified. There is a list of different character styles here. I can add this as Test 2 and you can see it even does it in that style there in the list. Now the cool thing is that I can go and select other words and use that style very easily and then I could change it. So, let me say that color is not going to work. Let's try this color here. Just like before I can Update Test 2 and it updates it in all these different locations.
So as you come up with new styles you are kind of building this list of paragraph styles and building this list of character styles and you can usually change it in one place and then apply that change everywhere else or you could simply have a modification of it. I could, for instance, increase this just one point here and then decide I'm not going to create a new style for that. That is just going to be a modification for this first paragraph and I'll always see Body asterisk there.
If I go over here and I were to select this paragraph and change the font and then I were to apply it to everywhere you can see it does that but it still remembers that this one is modified and the font size is larger. So it is remembering different things. Like font is universal throughout all of the body styles but in this case the body style says it is 11 point and this paragraph has a special exception where it is 12 point. So it remembers all this stuff.

Comments: 7 Responses to “Using Styles In Pages”

Dhruv

11 years ago

Hi Gary, is this applicable only to the new Mavericks Pages or can this be done on older versions of Pages (like earlier this year)?

Gary Rosenzweig

It works very differently on older versions.

Julian

Hi Gary, I have just bought a new MacBook Air and have the latest version of Pages installed now. in my older version ('09) you could assign a hotkey to a particular paragraph style. Is that still possible? or has this option now been removed?

That is one of the features that Apple has stated will be returning soon. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6049.

Lorraine McKenzie

I am writing a book with many photos included. There doesn't seem to be a facing pages option in Pages 5 so that the book can be bound. When I opened the file in Pages 5, text, photos and formatting were a mess and there weren't any facing pages. Is there a way to fix this or will Apple be including Facing pages again?

You will want to keep using the old Pages if you want to do a book like that. That's why Apple allows the old and new versions to co-exist on your Mac. Until this start-from-scratch version has all the features you need, keep using the old version. You may also want to look at Apple's iBooks Author app.

Lorraine

Thanks Gary

Comments Closed.

Using Styles In Pages

Comments: 7 Responses to “Using Styles In Pages”

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