MacMost Now 532: Basic Layout With Pages

Learn how to do basic page layout in iWork Pages. By starting with a page layout template instead of a word processing template you can easily add text blocks, titles and images. You can flow text from one box to another.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let's look at some of the basic page layout features of Pages. So most people think of Pages as a word processor, but it can also be used to do desktop publishing. Let's look at some of the basics. So here's the one big thing that you need to know. When you start Pages up, you get a template chooser. Now, it's very important what you do here. At the top are word processing templates. If you chose one of these, you going to get this backdrop of a basically large text box on every single page. You don't want that if you're doing page layout. What you'll want to do is go below to page layout, and in our case choose blank and you'll see it changes to blank canvas here and you can chose landscape or vertical. Let's chose a vertical layout. So now we have a canvas to work on instead of a page. You can click anywhere you want there's no place to enter text. So, you're going to start by adding elements. They're along the top here. You can add a text box just click on it and you'll get this text area here so we can type in the text box and I select outside of it and select inside it again and you can see the dots that go around the outside . That means it's draggable, it's stretchable, I can do all sorts of different things to change this text box so I'm going to put this here as a title for my page and then I can use some of the regular text editing stuff. I'm going to bring up the command T, the text inspector here and I can increase the font size, make it bold, I'm going to dismiss that and I'm also going to center it. There, so I've got a title. Now next I'm going to drag some pictures. I've got some pictures here on the desktop and I'm going to drag them directly in. Once I drop the picture in I can grab the handles and resize it, put it right about there. Now I want to have some text next to it so I'm going to add another text box and click outside of it and click back inside of it to select it and then I'll have some text here. I have a sample text document I'm going to open up and text edit here and paste some sample text in. Now let's continue. Let's say I want to add this other image here. Perfect, I'm going to put that in there. I'm going to shrink it just a little bit. Now one of the things you can do in Pages is have text flow from one text box to another. As you can see there's more text in here. I'm going to create another text box. Click outside of it, click in it again and put it here and and I want the text to continue in this text box so I'm going to do that, get it to the size I want, I'm going to select the first one, hold the shift key down and select the second one then go to format text box link select text boxes. Now you can see a line drawn there and the text flows from one to the other. I'm going to add one more text box here and add a caption to a picture and you can see I can continue from there I can add borders to these by going to the inspector, selecting the graphic inspector, changing the stroke to a picture frame, and choosing the type of picture frame. You can continue the text from one page to the next simply insert a page. I'm going to do a blank page after this you can see it there I can insert a text box and put it over here and I'm going to flow the text here's the bottom of this text box. Let's stretch it to where the bottom of the page and then I'm going to shift and select this text box on the next page and go format text box link and there I go see you can see now the flow of text by the blue lines. You can also group them together so for instance I want to group this caption the photo here so if I decide to move it will move as one until. Your range and I can group. Now it's a single object that I can move around. So there's some of the very basics for getting started doing page layout in pages. Until next time, this is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: 12 Responses to “MacMost Now 532: Basic Layout With Pages”

14 years ago

Awesome tips Gary! Thank you!

Crissy

Kudos to you! I hadn't thuohgt of that!

Denise

Hi Gary,
I got a iMac as an Xmas gift but my husband bought it at an online retailer rather than the Apple store, so I couldn't get the training. I stumbled on you and you have been INVALUABLE!! Thank you so much. I'm still a novice Mac user (don't even understand half the questions you get!), but I'm feeling more confident and happy every day as I go through your information. Thanks so much!

Gary Rosenzweig

Thanks!

Phil Kaplan

Love your short videos. Very helpful, Gary.

Jim R

Gary, I always learn something from your newsletter or video. Thanks!

13 years ago

AWESOME TUTORIALS. Not a lot of filler time, just down to the basics. This is so much easier than reading a magazine or instruction book.
Thank you,
Please keep them coming.

Geraldine

You saved me reading 2 boring chapters in a manual. More videos like this about page layouts would be greatly appreciated.

bernie

12 years ago

Hi
I am trying to get text to flow between several text boxes, which I have linked. However, when I past the text into the first text box (copied from a website) then it doesn't flow between the different text boxes, (even though they are linked). And the text exceeds the size of the first text box. Can you help?

Try unlinking them and relinking. Make sure the boxes are large enough to contain a single line of text. Experiment. Play around with it until you figure out what's going on.

Roger

Gary,

Still learning from your "My Pages" book. Tried out the "Page Headers". Looked for a way to have page headings on all but the first page. Is this possible?

Yes. Create two sections. The first section contains the first page, the second section contains the rest.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 532: Basic Layout With Pages

Comments: 12 Responses to “MacMost Now 532: Basic Layout With Pages”

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