MacMost Now 253: Cool Features of Pages 09

Todays episode lets take a look at some of the coolest things in Pages. So Pages is one of the most interesting and deep programs created by Apple, but a lot of the advanced features get overlooked as people just use it for basic word processing or to open up Microsoft word files. Lets go and take a look at a couple of cool things you can do with Pages. So here we are inside Pages and one of the cool things you can do in Pages is go to full screen mode. Full screen mode has a button up here in the upper left hand corner. You can also do option command U to go directly into it and get out of it. To go to full screen mode it looks like this. It basically blacks out the rest of your desktop and has a simple scroll down bar on the right so you can concentrate on what your are doing. For those of us that write you know how important it is to have a mode like this, to be able to go in and zoom in on just what you are doing and put all your mail and your browser window and everything else all behind you and out of sight. Another thing that Pages does is it is really good at taking notes. You can go into the templates user choose an outline and then you choose one of the many outlines here. One of the cool things is you can collapse outline headings. So for instance click on the little square to the left and it collapses everything under it. It makes it really easy to go ahead and keep notes and create an outline on projects you are working on without having a long document to look through. Another thing you can do inside Pages is you can add tables inside of them like this. Just click on the table button at the top and now you get a table here. You can go ahead and adjust the size of this table and its not just a table where you can enter data in, you can also perform calculations. It's basically a mini-spreadsheet, a numbers spreadsheet. Right here so if I start typing equals immediately it puts a familiar spreadsheet around it and I can go ahead and click in these windows to create a little formula and it will form the calculation. It will of course update the as I change the data in it and you can go ahead and just have these tables just inside of your document. Si it's a really handy thing to do if you create lots of things that have calculations inside of the document. So one thing I have often been asked, is What's the equivalent to Microsoft publisher on Mac? Well the answer is Pages. Pages isn't just a word processing tool its also a page layout tool. There is all sorts of different templates here for doing things like newsletters, brochures, flyers, posters, cards, and all sorts of stuff like that. These are basically templates that you can choose and you can also make up your own. There are different items here like images, text boxes, and things like that. You can use all these different tools to create basically any kind of desktop publishing job that you want. Not really something you would use for heavy duty, but for creating a lot of simple projects that a lot of us need Pages is the right tool for it. So one question I get asked a lot is how do I send a page document to somebody else if I don't know if they have Pages? Chances are they probably don't. No window users would have Pages, and their still the majority. A lot of Mac users haven't bought iWork and they don't have Pages either. Well in share menu you can go ahead and send the email as a page document, a word document, or better yet as a Pdf (which is much more universal) and should be able to be read by anybody. If your not using mail but you want to send it some other way or put it on a flash disk or something like that you can also go to file export and you can choose PDF, word, RTF (which is rich text format) which is another universal type. It doesn't work great for lots of complex layouts, but it could be useful for plain text. You can choose one of these, you can go o the next button to choose things like file name or save it and you have a copy of your document that you can send yo just about anybody. Another cool thing you can do with Pages is you can create Pdf's that have some security in them. So you can go ahead and export your document, you can save Pdf with the image quality, and also set security options. So you can require a password to open the document, print the document, or copy content from the document and you can set what those passwords are. So that is a quick look at some of the coolest features of Pages 09. Hope you find it useful. Till next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.