Creating Linked Text Boxes in Pages

With the new version of Pages you can now create linked text boxes to make complex page layout documents. The linking system works differently than in older versions of Pages, using colors and numbers to denote which boxes link and in which order. You can flow text across multiple boxes, and also on multiple pages. This feature is also in the iOS version of Pages, but with a slightly different interface.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: When Apple completely recreated Pages a few years ago one of the features they left out was Linked Text Boxes. Well, last week with version 6.2 it's back and it works differently. So let's go and look at an example. 
I've got a standard untitled document here. So one of the things I want to do is go to the Document sidebar and I want to remove the document body to turn it to a layout document. So I get rid of that background text document there. Now I'm going to go and create a text box.
So I create this text box right here. You notice right away there's this little circle at the top. That's the key to using linked text boxes. I'm going to paste some text in here. It's just a very long piece of text. I can expand the size of the text box. But I really want this to flow to another text box. 
So, let's for instance say we were going to insert an image in here. I'll put a place holder and you can see how I want the text to continue to flow underneath this. So what I can do now is create another text box and put it underneath here. Now how do I link the two of them?
Well, I go here and I click on this circle and what it's going to do is immediately create a linked text box. It's going to put two things in here. First a color and then a number. So the color it's going to use first is green here and it's going to put the number one. Now I go down here and I click on this circle and you can see it already has that green color in there. When I click on it, it changes to include that color green and number 2. You can see, sure enough, the text flows from one into two. I can continue this. 
Once I have this actually going I can continue this sequence there. So let's add a new page underneath here. We'll create a new text box down below and here I'll click again and I've got a three. I can increase this. Let's create a new text box here and we'll do four. So there you go. You've got the order there; one, two, three, four. It flows to each one. There's still more text left as shown by that plus button in the square there at the bottom. 
We can do things like switch the order. Like say it's supposed to go one, two, and then three is supposed to be this one. Like maybe we move it here like that. Now it's out of order. So what do we do. Well we click here and we can go into this menu and you can see I can change from four to three. That automatically switches this one. We can also say, hey this isn't supposed to be linked. This is supposed to be the start of a new thread here. So I can hit Create New Thread. Or Remove Thread which completely removes it from it so  it becomes its own separate text box. 
That's how you do it. If you're going to create another sequence here. So we'll paste in more text here. We've got this. We can create a new text box and link these. Make that a one by clicking in it and we'll make this one a two. So there's one and two of this reddish color as opposed to these which have the green color. Notice also when I select one text box the number and the color for all of the text boxes that are linked show up there. 
That's basically how you link text. You can have as many of these boxes as you want. Arrange them however you want and edit and change them however you want. It works out really nicely. It's a good new feature. I kind of miss the lines going from one to the other, like from the bottom of this one to the top of that one like a lot of layout programs use and old Pages used to use but this works just as well. Now it enables us to do all sorts of layout type documents in Pages like we could before. This was the main feature preventing us from really using Pages as a layout type of app.

Creating Linked Text Boxes in Pages

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information