Creating A Letterhead Template In Mac Pages

You can easily create your own letterhead template in Pages to be used any time you need to type a letter. Elements in the template can be placeholders for text. Other elements can be placed on section masters to appear on every page. You can save the template as an independent file, or to the templates chooser that appears each time you start a new document in Pages.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. In today's episode let me show you how to make a simple letterhead template in Pages.
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So let's say you want to create a template in Pages so you can quickly send a letter. It's going to have company information at the top and then some sample text that you can easily replace with who it's to, the body of the text, things like that. You can easily create a template for this and add it to the templates that appear when you create a new document in Pages.
I'm using Pages version 8.0 for this. I'm going to start off by choosing the blank document template. I want to be able to view the layout here. So I'm going to go to View and then choose Show Layouts. Now I can see where the body is so I want to leave some room here for some text at the top that will appear on each page. It will be the company's name and address. So what I'm going to do is go to Document in the right sidebar. I'm going to scroll down to Document Margins. I'm going to add some to the top margin there and you can see it moves the body down a bit. It's a little too much. I'm going to do 1.75, about that. 
So I'll have this blank space now that will appear on each page. I'm going to fill that blank space with some text boxes. So I'm going to click on the text box button there and move this text box and reshape it so it fits here. Then I'm going to enter the name of my company. I'm going to make that bold and I'm going to center it there. Then I'm going to add another one. So I'm going to Option drag and put a second text box there. You can see I have both text boxes. I'm going to select them both and set an Arrange, the text wrap, to None so I don't force any text to wrap. I'm going to put an address here. Then I'm going to arrange these a little bit closer to each other.
Let's add some graphics to this. I'm going to go to Shape and going to add a line. I'm going to put the line here so it appears just above this. I'm also going to set Arrangement for that to None. I'm going to Option drag to create a duplicate of that line. Now I've got a little bit of letterhead here at the top.
Now in the body here I want to include some standard things. So I want to have the date here at the top so I'm going to put an Insert and I'm going to use Date and Time. The neat thing about that is you can click it and it will actually ask you to select a date format set to today or choose from the calendar a date. So i don't have to type the date in. Now let's put in some basic information about who this is to. So we'll do a Name, Street address. 
The idea is we want to make these so they are placeholders. So I'm going to select one here. Just the name and I'm going to go to Format, Advanced, and Define as Placeholder Text. Note it's Control, Option, Command, T which is going to come in handy since we're going to do this a lot. I'll do it for this one with the keyboard shortcut and I'll do it for this with the keyboard shortcut as well. See when I click to select it selects the entire thing instantly so I can easily just start typing to replace it.
Now let's do some body text. I'm going to start off with the traditional Dear and then Name. We'll make that a placeholder as well. Then I'm going to insert some body text. So let's style this nicely. I'm going to provide a little more spacing after the paragraph. I'm going to update the body Style there. I don't want these to actually follow that so what I'm going to do is change the Style here. I'm going to add a new style called Misc for now and in this style I'm actually going to set it back down to nothing there. I'm going to Update Misc so it has that. I'm going to change all this to actually be the Misc style here.
I'm going to put an ending here and I'm going to change this as well to that Misc style. This I'm going to make into a placeholder as well and I can change this to a placeholder as well. So I've got a bunch of different placeholders here I could easily change. I've got the header up here.
Now let's say this were to go more than one page. I want to make sure this header is on all of the pages. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select it all and I'm going to go to Arrange, and Move Objects to Section Master. Now it's going to be on every page. So if I add another page here, so let me just hit Return a bunch of times like this letter is running a bit long, it adds another page. You can see I've got the header there on the second page as well as the first page.
So now I have a useable template here so I want to save it in such a way that I can easily access it. The first thing I want to do is I want to do a normal save. I just want to save this out someplace where I can edit this. This is kind of my source file. So I'll save it out as Letterhead Template Source. If I ever want to make modification for this I can easily open this up as a regular Pages document. But I'm also going to Save as Template. So this option Save here will save it as a regular file. When I open that file it's the same as choosing that template. But it won't appear in the Template Chooser. It just appears as a regular file.
That's useful if you have to create lots of these things. Or you can easily pass them around the office and just have people use this in particular situations. But I'm going to add this to the Template Chooser which is going to put it down in the last category here in the Template Chooser under My Templates. I can name it whatever I want. You can see it appears there. So now when I go to choose a template, I double click it, and I get this template here. I can just start typing to create a new letter.
So those are the basics. You can use all sorts of different types of Pages' objects in the template. Take a look at the templates that come with Pages for examples of what else you can do.
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Comments: 6 Responses to “Creating A Letterhead Template In Mac Pages”

Ronald Hecker

5 years ago

Very helpful. That's what I was asking for before. One note; you call this a letterhead but later you call it a header. A letterhead would only be on the first page. If you want a header [or more likely a footer] on subsequent pages that would be more appropriate.

Scott Smith

I think I know the answer but you are such a great source I'll ask anyway. In earlier versions of Pages there was a merge function that allowed you to populate fields with data, for instance by dragging a contact into a field or group of fields, very useful in a letterhead. Being dyslexic and a poor typist this ability was wonderful. I still keep a copy of the old Pages to use when I really need this trick. Do you know of a way to accomplish this with the latest and greatest Pages app?

Gary Rosenzweig

Scott: Can't you just copy and paste names and addresses and things like that? Sound like what you are talking about was a side-feature of the old mail merge functionality which is long gone.

Adrian Hayes

Another masterclass from Gary! I notice that when you went to save the template, you actually had a "Save As"function. My copy of Pages (Version 8.0 (6194)) only seems to have "Save". Is there an option somewhere to add "Save As"?

Adrian: In most apps like Pages, when you hold down the Option key and go to the File menu, the Save As option replaces the Duplicate item.

Of course I do copy and paste. The mail merge function let you fill any number of pre defined fields in by just dragging a contact card over the fields. It was great. As numbers got updated this function disappeared, many complained to Apple with out much luck. I keep hoping at some point it will reappear as a "new cool function". Although I don't use Office, I'm told it was and still is a function there.

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Creating A Letterhead Template In Mac Pages

Comments: 6 Responses to “Creating A Letterhead Template In Mac Pages”

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