Changing What Happens When Pages Starts

Comments: 3 Responses to “Changing What Happens When Pages Starts”

Gary Rosenzweig

11 years ago

When you launch Pages, all of the documents you were working on before will reappear. That's how the "Resume" function in Lion/Mountain Lion works. But if you have closed all of the documents and then quit Pages, then there are no documents to reopen.
So what happens is that you get a dialog box asking what should happen. There's no way to avoid this, as Pages doesn't know whether you intend to open an existing document, or create a new one.
The dialog box lets you select a file from either iCloud or from "On My Mac" -- you can see the two options at the top. If you switch from iCloud to On My Mac then you can see your files. Pages remembers your choice, so next time it will default to showing On My Mac and you would have to switch to iCloud to change it back.
You also get a "New Document" button at the bottom left of that dialog box. Click that to start a new document. If you want to keep your fingers on the keyboard, you can always override the dialog box with a quick Command+N to create a new document.
I don't know of any way to change this behavior and have Pages automatically create a new document when you run it. It is pretty quick and easy to take the extra step. If it was done the other way, then lots of people would have to close the new document when they first run Pages. I know Microsoft Word defaulted to this behavior for a long time and I found it extremely annoying personally.

Barb

11 years ago

Thank you, Gary, that helps a lot -- I'll use the Command+N option.

Shirley

11 years ago

I always have a blank Page Layout documement open because I almost use it exclusively. Just set it in Pages > Preferences.