How To Set Up a Default Template In Pages

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to create your own blank template to use in Pages. 

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So when you create a new document in Pages usually you start with Choose a Template, you select the blank document, and then you're stuck with all the defaults which you may not like. For instance here I've got the defaults for the Font, for the Body, Style and I may always change that to something I like better. You've got defaults for Spacing. You've got defaults for the Headers and Footers. You've got defaults for Character Styles. You may be used to changing these all the time everytime you start your Pages document. But you don't have to because you can setup a template that's your own template and make that the default template. So you never have to set things up again.

For instance let's select the text here. You can see this is Body, Style and let's change the Font to something else. I'll choose Minion Pro and say that's my favorite font. So now I've changed that. Let's even change the size. Say I want to make it 16 pt.  That's what I'd like to have my Body text set to. You could see now it shows it's Body text and it has an asterisk next to it meaning that it's been changed. Also there's an Update button. If I click the Update button it updates the Body, Style to reflect what's selected. So now Body, Style really is Minion Pro, 16 pt.

Now let's go and change all the other styles and get rid of  some we're not using. So I'll click here to see all the Paragraph Styles. Let me get rid of some I'm not even going to use. I won't use Heading 3 so I'll just select Delete Style. It's going to go and say Replace it with something but I don't have anything here so I can just select anything. It really doesn't matter. Let me get rid of a few more. Now let me convert the rest of them to the font I want. So I'll go to Title and you can see it changes that sample text to Title. I'll change that to Minion Pro as well. I'll make the font size a little smaller as well and I'll Update the Title.

Let's go to Subtitle. Let's change that as well and the size and Update.

I'll go through and do that to each one of these that I want to keep. So now you can see all the paragraph styles. They are updated to use new font and some of them new sizes. Now the next thing is I want to have more space in-between paragraphs. I like to write that way. So I'm going to select all of this and go to Spacing here. After Paragraph I'm going to add 8 pt. So now it creates this nice little break between paragraphs. It's easier to write and read. Now I want to Update that Body, Style so it saves that 8 pt as part of the Body, Style.

Next thing I want to do is add a page number at the bottom of all the pages. So I'm going to go to View and then Show Layout. Now I can see the Footer here. I'm going to click on middle Footer area and say Insert Page Number and just choose 1. So now part of this template is going to be the Footer is always going to have that page number at the bottom.

People mostly think of using templates when you want to start off with a document that has certain things in place. Like for a letter or a flyer or something like that. Elements that are already there. But it's also very useful to create a blank template. A word processing template that has nothing in it. Supposedly blank. But the styles and elements are set to exactly what you want. 

Before I save this as a template I want to get rid of all the sample text. I want it to be blank. I want this to be my blank template. So I want to start off with nothing there. Anything I leave in here is going to be part of that template. So I don't want to have that sample text in place.  So now that I've got everything the way I want I can go and say File, then I could do Save As Template. It's going to ask me if I want to save it normally or to Add to Template Chooser. I'm going to add that to the Template Chooser and I'm going to give it a name. So I'm going to call it My Blank Template. It appears at the bottom of the list here. You can see all of the subcategories here and under My Template is my blank template. It's at the bottom if I go to All.

Now I'm going to go to Pages, Preferences. In here I'm going to set it that for new documents it's going to use a specific template and change the template and choose this blank template. Now you can see it says Use template My Blank Template. Now I can close all of this and just remove that document I was working on there. Now I can say File, New and when I do I get a new blank document. Notice the Body text and all the styles are the font that I wanted. Notice the paragraph spacing is 8 pt. Even notice I have the page number there at the bottom.

Now I have a blank template that saves me a lot of time whenever I create a new document. There's nothing to prevent you from having several templates like this. If I use File and hold the Option key down you could see that I can do New from Template Chooser. I have room here for as many templates as I want. I can create other templates that I can use. Only one can be that default but I can create as many as I want. Click on My Templates here to quickly get to them and choose which one I want to start.