Align Text Perfectly With Tabs In Pages

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to align things perfectly using Tabs in Pages. 

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So here's a technique that has been around since the very beginning of word processors. But still a lot of people don't know about it. Say you're in Pages and you want to have a simple list of things and you want to align things up. Like, for instance, here I may want to have an event, have it shown like this here, and then on the next line I may want to also have it around the same point and I'll continue to add events for each day of this week. So this kind of works. But notice that these things aren't perfectly lined up. The reason for that is that each letter is a different width. So when we get to the end of these days you're at a different spot here. Just adding a bunch of spaces you're not going to be able to perfectly line things up. Things are always going to be a little off. 

So the way to properly do this is to use Tabs. Now at first Tabs don't seem to be a great solution. I'm going to select all these spaces here and Delete them and then hit the Tab key. You could see how it tabs out to a certain point. Let's do the same thing here. You could see now these line up but they are a little too close. What's worse is that if I do it here it's going to line up to a different point. The same point for this one and then this one will go back to the original. What's happening here is we haven't set Tab Stops, the point at which the tabs go to. So it's just using some default ones which are every half inch. 

In order to set Tab Stops we want to go to View and then Show Ruler. The ruler up here allows us to set the points for the tabs. The first thing you need to do though is you need to select all of the lines for which this is going to effect because Tab Stops can vary from line to line. So now that we've selected all those lines we can drag the Tab Stop and you could see as I go past the default tab these all line up. So I can set this at something like, let's say, 3½ right there. So you can see now they all perfectly lineup. So the very first tab on any of these is here. If that point on is goes to the default which is every half inch. You could see as I tab out. So this is the simplest way to get these things to lineup perfectly. 

Now the tabs actually can do various things. Let's select all the lines again and I could double click on this and it will change to a Center Tab. So the centers of all of these are lined up. I can do the Right Tab so all of the right sides of these lineup which may actually work in this type of thing. Then you can double click again and this is a Decimal Tab. So the decimal point will lineup and this works if you have numbers there and you want the dot and zero zero or dot five zero all to lineup no matter what characters are after it. We'll leave it at the Left Tab for this case. 

Now you can actually get more control of these tabs by going in Format to Layout. Then here you'll see Tabs. You'll see a listing of each tab. So in this case it's 2½ inches in from the left since the left starts at one inch. That's where this. We can see the alignment is left or one of those other things I talked about. You could also set a Leader. What a Leader is is a character that fills the gap. So let's select periods, for instance. You could see how we get those periods. Notice the periods lineup perfectly with each other. You could actually format the periods separate. These periods are actually part of a single character in the document. Just the Tab. So this is the tab. Instead oof just being a big space it's a space filled with periods. So if I double click any of these to select it I could actually do something. Like, for instance, set the text color for those.

Now when you're at the end of a line and you go to the next line it's going to keep the same tabs for the next line. So notice I've got this here and if I do Return, Return, Return, you could see all the new paragraphs or lines that I'm creating have that Tab Stop. So another common thing that you need to do is to be able to lineup blanks. For instance, let's say you have Name:. Maybe what you would normally do is a space and then the Underscore character a bunch of times to create the name field. Then something else and the same thing here and you try to lineup the end. You notice you can't really lineup the ends here. Jagged there as well. If I remove this one it's too short, that one is too long. You can use Tab Stops to fix this as well. 

Let's get rid of all of these underscore characters. Instead use Tab. So what I want to do here is to Tab Stop from the beginning to the end of the blanks. So I'll have the blanks start right there and I'll click here to add another one and have it end right here. So the blanks will stretch from this to this. Now there's nothing there right now. I could add two tabs for each one. You could see how it actually picks up those periods that we had before. Let's select all of these. Go back to Layout. Then we can see we have two Tab Stops now and they are both aligned Left. Then we have a Leader for the first one. Let's get rid of that and set it to None. Let's set the Leader for the second one two blanks. Now you could see how you have these perfectly lined up blanks here starting at the exact same point and ending at the exact same point because they are just between these two Tab Stops. Now I can adjust them a little bit. Now you get a very professional looking form instead of the jagged blanks that start and end kind of at random little spots.

So you could also use Tables for doing a lot of this. Tables work really well if there are a lot of columns and a lot of data involved. But for simple little lists or forms like this Tab Stops work great to get everything lined up nice and precisely. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.