How To Make Multi-Column Documents In Pages

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you two ways that you can build Pages documents with multiple columns of text.

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There are two ways that you can build Pages documents with multiple column of text. The first is to simply add columns to the default body text in a word processing document. So let's create a new Pages document using the basic blank template here. Now what you've got is a word processing document. You can tell you have a word processing document by looking at File and it says Convert  to Page Layout. That means you're in word processing mode and not Page Layout mode. A word processing document has one text box that basically goes from page to page. If you go to View, Show Layout you can see it.So you can see this big text box that I'm in. 

Let me paste some text into here and you can see now it fills up several pages and it just flows from one page to the next. Now with the cursor somewhere in this text box you can set this to be multiple columns pretty easily. Just go to the Format sidebar here and then go to Layout. You'll see Columns and you can increase the number right there. So now you can see I'm in a two column layout. You can increase it to as many as you want. You can select the Gutter, so the space between them, and the size for each column. If you have equal column width then it's always going to match. So I change that to two and then it goes to two for the second column and a 2½ inch gutter. If I do unequal width then I can actually have odd widths like that and I'm going to manually set the gutter.

Now this may be all that you want. But notice how it's two  columns for every page. So basically the page goes from the upper left hand corner, down the first column, down the second column to the lower right hand corner and then back to the upper left hand corner of the second page. What if you just wanted to do two columns on a single page. You can actually do that but you're going to have to play around with sections. So you can't just have the text change from two columns to one column on the next page. If I change it, it's going to change it for all the pages.

But what you can do is you can put the cursor where you want the page break to be. Inserting a page break won't help. That just basically has blank space until the beginning of the next page. But you can insert a Section Break. A Section Break will move to the next page like before. (I can get rid of the extra space there.) On the second section here I can change that to be a different number of columns. Now note this is a hard break here. If I were to keep adding text to this it actually adds another page in-between, before the next section. So you have to pick the exact moment where it jumps from a two column layout to a one column layout.

The second way to do this is in Page Layout mode. There you can create your own text boxes. You could put multiple columns in those text boxes as well. But you can also link text boxes together to put multiple columns on each page. So this would be if you were creating something like a newsletter or a flyer or something like that. Create a new document just as before but now you would go to File and Convert to Page Layout. So now you don't have that text box anymore that goes page to page. If you go to Show Layout there's nothing on the page.

Here you would create individual text boxes. So I'll click here to create a text box and I can paste some text into it as before. Now I can move this text box wherever I want. You can even make this text box multiple columns. If I go to Format, Text Layout you can put two columns inside this box. But that's probably not what I want. What I want is to probably do a custom layout. So I can expand this box here to fill up the page. Let's say I want to do another column but I want to have it start lower. I'll do another text box and put that over here. I'm going to have to shrink that a bit and play with the sizes of these columns. 

Now I can have text flow from this box to this box. The way I do that is to click here and then go to this box and click there. Those little dots at the top now link one to the other. It wraps from here to here. Now I can do what I need with this text box here. Resize both of them. Set the gutters as I want to get it exactly what I want for matching the layout, or whatever it is that I'm doing. So it's highly customizable using two different text boxes like this. Now if you wanted to continue this on the next page you'll actually have to add a new page to it. Create a text box here. I'll go up to the top here and click this number there. I'll go to here and I'll click the dot here at the top and it will link it automatically to the previous one. So now it flows from here down to this one and I can create another box there.

This not something you want to do if you have a lots of pages of text. But if you simply have, like, two columns on this page and then it continues on another page in a third column then that's fine. It gives you the maximum amount of versatility. 

Why do you need multiple columns? Well, there are lots of different reasons. One is, for instance, you may want to come up with a layout that works with an image in the center. So, for instance, I can add a photo here and put it in the middle and then have it wrap around like this which creates a nice looking layout. Also, if I were to click here and do three columns then I have another option there just by putting the image there in the middle column like that. 

Multiple columns also works great for lists. So here if I have a list of something and they're all pretty short items you can see how it runs several pages. But I can easily shorten this to fewer pages by just adding more columns here. You can see how I can fit the list of a lot of different items using multiple columns. 

Another reason to do it is to just get a nice kind of newspaper look to it. In that case you'll probably also want to go to Style and then set the Alignment to justified. Select all of the text there and set it to Justified. So now the columns look really nice. You can also add text boxes for things like Headlines and the text in all the columns will wrap. Then maybe change this to a font that kind of fits that newspaper style.

So there are many reasons why you may want to use multiple columns in your Pages document.