How To Use Multiple Columns In Mac Pages

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using multiple columns in Pages on your Mac. 

Apple's Pages app gives you the ability to have more than one column of text on a page.  But how you do this depends on which mode in Pages you're in. Let's start with Word Processing Mode. I'm going to show you how to get multiple columns and also lots of ways to modify it and adjust it. 

So in Pages I'm going to choose the Blank Template. This will give us a word processing document as opposed to Blank Layout, which we will look at later, which gives us the Page Layout Document. These are two very distinct modes in Pages. So you want to make sure you're using the right one. For most users you probably want Word Processing mode for any books, reports, articles. Anything like that. Page Layout mode is more for signs, posters, and newsletters. I'm going to double click on the blank template here and it will open up a new document that's in word processing format. You can tell because if you go File and look here you'll see Convert to Page Layout. That means you're currently in word processing mode. 

Now i'm going to insert some sample text. I've got a lot of text here and it's one big column on the page going from page to page to page. I want to make this two columns. All I need to do is go to the Format Sidebar. If you don't see the sidebar at all click Format here at the top and then go to the Layout Section there. Then you'll see Columns. If this section is collapsed then you want to expand it like that. Now just change from one to two columns. You can see that now we've got two columns of text on every page. The text flows from the top left, down the first column to the bottom of the page and then goes up to the next column and then down to the bottom of this column and then to the beginning of the first column on the next page. It just flows naturally like that. If I add an extra line in here you'll see how it pushes down this paragraph, which then pushes one line to this column on the next page and so on. So it makes a lot of sense and it allows you to produce a document that is two columns like this. 

Here's another example. This is just a long list of names. It could be a list of anything. You may want to put this in multiple columns so you don't have so much white space. So you can go to Format, Layout here and make this two columns. You can also go to more. So you can do three columns or four columns like this so it takes up a lot less space. I can fit this long list of names on one page if I do four columns. Notice that you get this little table here showing you each column and its width and the gutter, which is the space between that column and the next one. So you only see the gutters for every column except the last one there. You can adjust the column widths. So if you want the columns to be a little wider, let's do 1½ inches, you can see how it automatically adjusted the gutters between them so it still fits everything on the page. You can also uncheck this and then you can make columns that have more than one width. So adjusting this one takes a little away from the next. You have a lot of ability here to adjust things. If you want to see exactly what's going on with the Columns and Gutters you can go to View and then Show Layout. Then you can see clearly outlined here each column and the gutters between then. 

Let's go back here to the regular text and look at Justification. Everything here is left justified. So the left sides of the text lineup on each column but the right side just ends where the last word can fit on the line. We can select All, Command A there, and go to Style and then change the justification from left to Justified. So both sides here, both left and right, are going to match. It's going to adjust the spacing between each word to do that. You commonly see this in newsletters and in newspapers and magazines where they want the text to look like nice even columns like this. When you insert an image or an object or a shape here, like that, then justification can make for a nice layout like this. 

If you find these videos valuable consider joining the more than 2000 others that support MacMost through Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts and more. You can read about it at macmost.com/patreon. 

Also, let's talk about Column Breaks. Let's go back to one column here and if I wanted to go to the next page starting with this next paragraph I can put the cursor just at the beginning of the paragraph here and then insert a Page Break. This will tell Pages that after this line here to break to the next page. You can do the same for Columns. So let's go to two columns like this. If I insert a Page Break, let's say right here, it will break to the next page. Not even getting to use this second column. But if I insert, instead, a column break it will break to the next column. So it jumps from this column to the next column. Inserting a column break in the second column will work, kind of like a page break except as you add more text then it may end up that the column break is on the left side instead of the right side, so it breaks simply to the next column instead of the next page.

Now let's look at using different numbers of columns in the same text. So by just putting the cursor anywhere in here and adding another column it changed it for the entire block of text, in this case many pages. But if instead specific paragraphs. So you have to select all the way to the end of the paragraph. You can see the paragraph mark there at the end. You have to select at least one whole paragraph and you can select several. So I'll select two like that. I've got that selected and I've changed the number of columns it will change it just for that selection. So I end up going from one column here to two columns for these paragraphs and then back to one column. It's tricky to use this. See if I only select, say, most of this paragraph but not the end, it changes everything. You've got to select the entire paragraph including that paragraph break at the end for this to work. Then you can see that this special break here that breaks the number of columns. So you've got these two columns here instead of the other ones. It's also hard to get the divider between these adding the before paragraph and after paragraph changes here. It doesn't seem to produce any results. The same thing for the paragraph before it. But you can put an extra line like that and like that if you want. It doesn't always make sense to use this for regular text. But sometimes you've got a list inside of text, like this. So you want to select that entire list. Make sure you get that last paragraph mark there. Then you can change the number of columns for this and it makes more sense to have a list like this, a little more extra space before and after it and you can take up less space here. You can even make this three or four columns like that and fit the list nicely into your text. 

Another time where you want to vary the number of columns is when you've got a Heading. For instance I've got this Heading right here. I'll actually change it to Heading Style, like that. Now if I were to change the number of columns you can see how it puts the Heading like that. You may want to have the Heading go all the across instead. So what you can do is you can select all of the text, except the Heading, and change it to two columns or you can change everything to two columns and then select this part here. Make sure you get the last paragraph mark, and change this to one. You can see how this now stretches all the way across. Then later in the text you can do the same thing. Make sure you get that last paragraph mark there. Change this to one and now this goes all the way across. 

Let's finish up by talking about Page Layout Mode. In Page Layout Mode you don't have Body Text. There's nothing here you can paste text into until you create a Textbox. So with this textbox we can have some text in it, like that. There may be too much text to fit into the box. So you may want to have second column. What you can do is create another textbox, like this one, and link these two together to create two columns of text. So select this textbox here and look for the circle at the top. Click that and that will make this the first textbox in a linked chain of textboxes. Then go to the second one and click the circle at the top there and it will make it the second textbox in this link here. So we can insert more lines of text into here and you can see how it pushes into that next column. So these are linked and now they work as two columns. So you can set these up, say, to work as a newsletter, with two columns of text. You can make them different sizes or the same size. You can have this one start further down or perhaps this one start further down and put an image here if you like. You can continue to add more textboxes to the links here even on another page. So I can add another page here and then I'll add another textbox here, click the top, and it will link these two to this one. This is now the third one and you can see the number there. You have the ability to create new threads, create new sets of links, new textboxes. A newsletter may have multiple articles, for instance, or you can remove this textbox from the thread. You can use this to create columns pretty much manually designing exactly the textboxes you want and how the text flows. 

But note even if you have one textbox here you can still use Format and then Text, and then Layout, and then create multiple columns inside that textbox as well doing all the things I showed before in Word Processing Format. So I can create two or three columns here. Adjust the column sizes, gutters, and so on. So I hope you found this look at using columns in Pages useful Thanks for watching.