How and Why To Make Your Own Pages Template

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how and why you want to create your own Pages template.

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So there are many uses for Pages' templates. You may think of more when you use Page Layout documents like creating a newsletter template for instance. But what I'm going to talk about here is creating a word processing template. So usually when you start off on Pages you choose a template and would choose the Blank template. This would create a new word processing document ready to go. Now let me type a line here. If I look at this line I could see here under Format that this is Helvetica Neue, Regular, 11 pt. This is the Body Style. So if I wanted to change it to something else I can say increase the Font size. Now I'm using Body Style altered, which is the little asterisk there, and I can Update Body Style. If instead I wanted this to be, say, the title then you could see the Title Style is Helvetica Neue, Bold, 30 pt. If this was going to be the Heading you could tell Helvetica Neue, Bold, 18 pt. Or use whatever style you want and then in the default template these are all Helvetica Neue, and each has its own style and size. 

But what if you find you don't want to use Helvetica Neue. Or maybe you don't want the Body Style to be 11pt. Like say you wanted it to be 13 pt and, say, you wanted it to be Times New Roman instead. Well, you can see I've altered the Body Style here. So if I want to use that throughout the document as my style I could Update and now wherever I use Body Style it would be Times New Roman, Regular, 13 pt. The other styles are unchanged. So if I go to Heading you can see that is Helvetica Neue, Bold, 18 pt. Go back to Body and I've got Times New Roman. 

Well let's say I want Heading to actually be something different. Let's say I want it to use Futura for the Heading and I want it to be 16 pt and instead of Bold I want it to be Condensed Extra Bold. Now I can Update the Heading and that's my Heading Style which just changes that. If I go to Heading 2 you can see that is Helvetica Neue and Title is Helvetica Neue as well. So I've got to go through here and either change these styles or maybe remove some of them. Like, maybe, I don't use Subtitle. So I can click here and I can say Delete this style and that one is gone. I can alter these as I want. I can also use the Plus button here to add new ones. 

Now the only problem here is I'm doing it for this one document. So I might get this one document looking exactly like I want but the next time I start a new document I'm going to be back with the original styles all using Helvetica Neue, at the size and style that they are set to in that template. So I'm often asked how do I have it so that the default font and size are something else. They're not Helvetica Neue, they're what I want to use every single time. Well, there are two ways to do this. 

One actually is just to go to Pages Settings and under General you can set Default Font. You can check that and set the Font to something else. So I can set it, for instance, to Times New Roman. I can set it to 13 pt and say Okay. You can see that checkbox is checked there. I've got the font and size. I can click the Change button to change it. It doesn't change the current document or anyone I've created to this point but if I create a new document and choose Blank now you could see that the Body Text here is Times New Roman and all of the other styles are also Times New Roman. The Font size has been adjusted so since I made the Body Style a little bit bigger then the Title Style is going to be a little bit bigger as well. You can see it is 35 pt. So it's a quick and easy way to basically change that default Blank template to use your own Font and a slightly larger or slightly smaller size. 

But what if you wanted to have different fonts for the different styles. Or maybe get rid of some of these styles or add some of your own? Well, you can create your own template. As a matter of fact that's basically what we've been doing here just by altering all of these styles here we now have a set of styles that we may want to include in a template. So now I can create a template from this. The first thing I want to do is clear off all of the text. So I'm going to select All, Command A, and delete. So it is a blank document. Because that is what I'm creating here. A new blank document template. So I've got this blank. I've got the Style set like I want. Now I can just go to File and then Save As Template. Now I can choose to Add To Template Chooser, which is what I'm going to do or if I wanted to I could Save this as an individual file somewhere else that I can double-click on to open up. But let's add it to the template chooser so like it is part of Pages. I put it down here under My Templates. Notice all the categories here to the left and My Templates is the last one. 

So we'll name this one. We'll call it My Blank. You can call it something else and as you can probably guess you can have several of these. So you can have one that is setup for your everyday use. Maybe one that is for a specific report that you do and so on. I've got this setup now as My Blank. So now when I go to create a new document in Pages and I go to choose a template, I go down to My Templates at the bottom and choose My Blank. Now you can see that all of these styles are set as I like. So there's the Heading now that was set with Futura. The Body is now Times New Roman. The one's that I have eliminated are eliminated. Any ones that I have added are been added. So now you don't have to customize styles every single time you create a new document. You just have this template that you start. Notice if I go to File, New here the top is Recents. So if I just used My Blank you can see how that is now the first template here. It's just as easy to choose as the Blank template that comes with Pages was before. In fact you can go to Pages Settings and you could set for new documents, Use the template and then Change Template and choose My Blank. So now when I create a new document it doesn't even show the Template Chooser. If I go to File, New it chooses My Blank by default. I can still go to File and then hold the Option Key down and New changes to New From Template Chooser. Option Command N. I can always choose a new template. But the default will be My Blank if I just do Command N or File, New. 

You get more than just the regular styles with the template. You also get the Character styles. So if you customize those then those would be saved in the template as well. The same thing with Bullets and List. You've got styles for those. You can add and alter those and those will be part of the template. All of these different properties are saved as part of different styles. Things in Layout would be saved. Or special indents or columns. Let's make this two columns. Let's make some special Indents here. Show Rulers to see the Indents. Under Documents we can setup lots of things. Like, for instance, I can go and show Layout there and get rid of the Header and Footer if I don't use those. Maybe even change the page type to Legal. I can now Save this as a template if I want all of those things. I'll call this Temp here. You can even see the representation of it shows that it is legal size. So now if I create a new document from this you can see that it is two columns. That the Header and Footer are gone and all those other properties have been changed. So there is a quite a bit you can setup in a blank template if if is something that you use with pretty much every single document you create. 

If you ever just want to use the regular blank template remember you can always go back to it. It will always be there in addition to any templates you've created on your own. To manage these templates you can Control Click on anyone and you can see I can rename it. You can delete it to clean things up if you've got too many. 

Now if you ever want to make some changes and update a template you can always just make the changes, Save As Template again and then when you get to the Template Chooser you can give it a temporary name, like I'll call this one Temp2. I can Control Click on this one and delete it. Then you can go back and rename the new template with that original name. So now you've just basically replaced the template with an updated version. 

So if you find yourself always making changes to your Pages' documents right when you start off, there's no reason to do that. Just create your own template with your own styles and settings and then use that every time you start a new Pages document. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.