How To Create Custom List Styles In Pages

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can create custom list styles in Mac Pages. 

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Now despite the fact that you have lots of options for taking notes on your Mac, like the Notes App itself, probably the best app for note taking in either a class or meeting is Pages. You just have all of the different word processing options there including the ability to highly customize your lists. A lot of times we take notes using lists, not just plain text. 

So, for instance in Pages if I wanted to start making a list I would first go to Format and then at the bottom of the Format sidebar I would select, under Bullets & Lists, a style. I could just skip the style, leave it at None, and just go right to selecting some options. But there are some preset styles here already. So all of these, except two, are going to be pretty uniform. For instance, with a Bullet List if I were to type one line like this and the next line, press the Tab key to indent it, notice it uses the same bullet there for the second line. If I go and choose one of these other ones, like say Lettered, you could see it chooses the same type of lettering. If I choose Numbered the same type of numbering and even this one, for Dash here, it chooses the same dashes. 

But these two, Harvard and Note Taking, are different. With Harvard you get Roman Numerals for the first level. You get Letters capitalized for the second level. The third level is Numbers and each level does something a little bit different. Like that. Likewise if I switch to Note Taking you could see it  alternates between Dashes and Bullets. 

Now if I go back to None I can select my options independently of the style. So I can go right here and you could see the three options are Text, Image, and Numbers. So Text Bullets allows me to use any piece of text as a bullet. The bullet character there is the default but I can choose another one or I can type something here,. So I can type a single character like that or even multiple characters like that to create bullets. I could also choose Image Bullets instead. Then you get to see a variety of different images that you could use or you can choose your own custom image and select an image there and it will be used as a bullet. In addition you also have Numbers which are really numbers and letters. When you choose those you have all these different options here for the different ways you can use numbers and letters. Basically it will just count through 1 through 4 or A through Z or using Roman numerals and a variety of different styles for doing that. 

So I could choose, say, basic numbers like that and you can see each one of these is the first item here. If I continue with one of the levels you can see how it continues to number them. You can see I can also turn on Tiered to Numbers. So you actually can see all of the numbers going back for each individual level. 

So there are a lot of options there and you can easily customize them. So, for instance, I can choose Bullet and then I can change the bullet that is chosen. So let me choose a character like this. Now notice it says Bullet and it has an asterisk next to it. If I click here I can use Update and it would update this bullet style to always use this character rather than a standard bullet. I can also click the Plus button here and create my own. Like that. Now I can use this style somewhere else. But even better than that I can Update the style and it will be universal. So, for instance, I can go down here and make another list, maybe later on in my document, and I can choose my bullet there like that and use it like that. 

Now if I go up here and I select this Table, I'm going to select all the lines in it, and I change the bullet to something else, let's change it to an arrow like this, then you can see how I can Update my bullet by clicking the Update button. It not only updates this list but also all the other lists using that same style. Now you can do this on a level by level basis. So, for instance, what I'm going to do here is just put the cursor blinking in this first level here. I'm going to change the type of bullets to numbers. Let's have it be numbered like that. Just with regular numbers. I'm going to go to My Bullet and I'm going to Update. Notice how anything else using that same style at that level will now update. I can do the same thing for this one here. I could go and let's say I want to change this to be Numbers and I'm going to use Letters here. I'm going to turn off Tiered. Now if I go and Update you could see how it updates elsewhere as well. 

Now you can continue to do that. So let's go in here, for instance, and I'll update this one to Numbers as well but I'll do lower case letters. Like that and I'll Update. Now we can go here to the fourth level and let's say I don't use bullets at all for this. So I can do here is select No Bullets. Now the interesting thing about this, you could see it updates all the lines in the list that are at that level and are this style. The great thing about this is for note taking it can be really good at some point to actually stop with all of the numbering and lettering and just let you actually add a bunch of information.

So now you've got this specialized version called My Bullet right there. Let's go ahead and Save this for later. You can do that one of two ways. One is you could simply not do anything. If I were to create a new document here and then go and want to use that special bullet list type, you could see it's not listed here. It's because it is only saved in the document itself. But to get it over to a new document all you need to do is Copy one or more lines of this style. Just copy them. Then go into your new document and Paste them in. Now notice My Bullet carries on. It's not actually in the list here but you can easily add it with the Plus button. You can see how it adds it right there. So, now that I've added it I can Delete this list here completely, you know turn off this line being a list, and at some other point in the document I can use My Bullet right there. 

So if you use this in one document and much later on you want to use it in another you can just Copy and Paste a line or two from that old document just to bring the style over. Of if it is something you want to use all the time all you need to do is, if you've created a document like this and it's got that style in it, then you go to File and Save As Template. Now either add it to the Template  Chooser or save it as a template independently and let me call this Notes and I've added it there. Now if I create a new document using the Notes Template then notice in Bullets & Lists I've got my special style ready to go. I could have also just Updated these other styles here to my liking and they would all be ready to go in this new template that I've created. I can even go into Pages, Settings and under General I can have new documents always use a certain template. So If I'm using Pages for notes all the time I could just Update the template that I want to start with always with this list type.

You can even set this up so when you create a new document from the template it is ready to go instead of being listing Bullets, None I can have this set to My Bullet and you can see how it is set there and ready to go. Now if I saved this as a template, like this, and I'll call this Notes2 notice if I create a new document from that it starts off ready to go with the right bullet and list style chosen. 

So I hope you found this useful. I hope it encourages you to experiment with Bullet Styles. Before the next time you need to use them create a sample document. Play around and see what you can do. See how you can customize each level of a list like this and maybe create a style or two that you'll use in a  template in the future. Thanks for watching.