How To Use Styles In Pages

Paragraph styles in Pages make it easier to easily and consitently apply font styling and formatting in your documents. When you use styles from the start, you can apply them to all parts of your document and easily make changes throughout.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to use Styles in Mac Pages. 
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So when a lot of people use Pages they start typing away and if they want text to look different in any spot they'll select that text and then change things about the text like the font, the font size, the font styling. They'll do that anywhere in the document that they need the text to look different. But then that's really hard to maintain. If you want to make any changes to your document you have to change the text everywhere you want the change to happen. Let me show you how Styles in Pages can make your document much easier to maintain.
So here I've got a blank word processing document. Now let me start it off in the typical fashion and just add a few lines here. So here's the beginning of my document. The first line says Chapter 1 and then a title for that chapter and then I start typing my text. Now this text all looks the same and it would be nice to have, say, Chapter 1 be larger text. I could go over here to the Format sidebar and under Style I could increase the font size, I can make it bold, and I can maybe do something similar for this one here. But then I need to remember exactly how I did it for each chapter. So for instance I can see here okay I made this 16 point bold. This is 13 point bold. The next time I start a new chapter I have to recreate that.
An easier way to do that would be to use Styles. So you can see Styles appear here. These are called Paragraph Styles. To apply them all you need to do is either select the entire paragraph or just put your cursor anywhere in the paragraph. Then click here to see all the different paragraph styles. Now select one that makes sense. In this case we'll select Heading for this chapter heading here. Then the next line we want that to be different so I'm going to go and use Heading 2. Now this text here already has the Body text style applied to it. We'll leave the as is. 
What we'll do as we write we'll apply the same styles to every chapter heading. So here I've got a lot of text in the document. You could see here I've got the chapter number there and the chapter title Heading and Heading 2 are the styles. If I scroll down I could see there's the beginning of chapter 2. That's Heading and Heading 2 as well. All of the text that's body text is using the style Body text. I also have some images here on the right and I have a caption under them in a little text box. If I go in and look at the text here I could see it's using the style Caption. So I'm using these different styles. 
Now what this gets me is the fact that I can change the styles very easily. So let's say I want the chapter number to be a little different. Maybe that should be actually smaller and the chapter name should be larger. Let me go and select the entire paragraph here and then I'm going to change things about it. Let's shrink the font size down and maybe apply a text color to it. Maybe I'll make it gray. That's how I want my chapter numbers to look. However if I go to the next chapter you can see I'd have to go and do the same thing here. If I've got 72 chapters I would have to do the 72 times. 
But selecting this I could see now that it's still using the Heading style but with an asterisk next to it and there's an Update button. If I use that Update button what it will do is it will update the Style. That will apply it to any paragraphs using that style. So let me click that, I'll Update, and now if I go down to the next chapter I could see, look at that, it updated that style and the next chapter after that the same thing. It updated that style. So if I have 72 chapters I could change the style on one of those chapter numbers, and then go and Update, and it will apply it to all 72 of them.
 I could do the same thing here for the chapter name. That's Heading 2. So let's say I wanted to make that a little bit bigger here and maybe change this text color is like a blue like that. Now that won't apply it to the next chapter title until I select that paragraph there with the new style and hit Update. Now it updates Heading 2 throughout. I can do the same thing if I wanted for Body text. So body text is all of this but if I just select this first paragraph here and I were to change it. Let's say I don't want to use this font. Let's say i want to change it to this font here and maybe make it 1 point smaller. Great, I want to apply that to all of the rest of the text here. Hit Update and now all of the Body text has updated.
Now you don't just have to use the styles that are shown here in the list. This is just what's included with the blank template when you start a new document in Pages. Let's say I want to do something special here. I want to sometimes pull text out and have it kind of used as a quote in the middle of the text. So let's pick a piece of text here and then I'm going to make it this special format here. It's going to be a paragraph by itself. It's going to be Centered. Let's select the text here and maybe make it a different color and let's add even some spacing before and after the paragraph and even make it Italic. 
Now that's how I want it but I want to use that throughout my document. I don't want to have to recreate all of that stuff every time. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a Style. So I'm going to put my cursor in this paragraph here and you could see it says Body text and I could Update Body text. That would make all the Body text centered and blue, and Italic, and all that. I don't want that. Instead I want to click here and then click the Plus button to create a New Style. So I'm going to call this Quote. You can see how it even makes the name here in the Paragraph styles list look somewhat like the style being used.
Now that I've done that I can create another place where I have a quote. So, for instance, let's do one right here. There's my new paragraph. All I need to do now is Apply the Quote paragraph style to it. You could see how it changes there. I could then Update this. I could say, alright let's make this Bold. That will make it even better. Update the Quote style to make it look just like that. I want to go back to that first quote and you could see that's bold as well.
So imagine an entire document with tons of chapters, tons of quotes, and tons of captions and how easy it is to update all those styles consistently throughout the document as long as you've been using Styles since the beginning. 
Now Paragraph Styles are the main type of style in Pages. But there are other as well. For instance you can do Character styles which can be on elements that are smaller than a paragraph. So they can be phrases, words, or even individual characters. Let's say, for instance, I want to have some pieces of text, some words, highlighted. I can select the text here and let's make this a different color. I'll make this red like that and I'll make it italic and bold. Now let's say that's something I want to do throughout the document. There's going to be certain words I want to highlight like that. I can't use Paragraph Styles because that would update the entire paragraph. As a matter of fact all of the body text with that style.
But I can use Character Styles. You can see Character Styles is a much smaller element here in the Format sidebar. If I click there you can see there are various ones already there. Link, Emphasis, Strikethrough, all of that. None is the default. Let me add a new one here. I'll just call this Special for special words. I can use this Character Style in the same way I used Paragraph Style but instead of entire paragraphs any group of characters I want. So I can go down here, select this word, put Character Styles, select my Special character style, and you can see I've set that one up. Here's another one I'll make that Special as well.
Now let's say I decide oh red isn't the color here. So I can select some of the text there that uses that style, Update the color or any other thing about that character style, and now you can see it's Special with that asterisk there. I can hit Update and now it updates all of the pieces of text that use the Special character style. Now Character styles, of course, can't do everything that Paragraph styles do. For instance Spacing doesn't make sense when talking about characters. It only makes sense when you're talking about paragraphs. So Character styles remember things like the font, the size, the styling, and the color. But they won't work with things like Justification or paragraph spacing.
If you want to go further with that there are also Bullets list styles here. You can see Bullet lists has list styles that works in the same way. You can add new ones. You can Update them. So if you use a lot of bullet lists you can do exactly what I've been showing you with Paragraph styles and Character styles but with Bullet list styles. You can go at anytime and click the button to the right here. You can Rename a style, you can Delete a style if you want. You can assign a F key as a shortcut for a style. So you can make it even easier to apply these styles.
Like with anything else that you learn on your Mac you should practice this. So instead of just using it in an important document that you're working on right now, if you're not used to Styles create an example document like I did just here. Make it kind of a playground for using Styles so you learn the ins and outs before you use it in the documents you're actually working on.

Comments: 14 Responses to “How To Use Styles In Pages”

Peter Grigg

1 year ago

Another excellent video. Do you have a favourite Lorem Ipsum generator?

Gary Rosenzweig

Peter: LittleIpsum in the Mac App store.

👍 Don’t you ever rest? You must have the quickest response time on the Internet.

Will Kay

Many thanks. Great and helpful video.

Alan

Great explanation of styles. If I want to use my newly created styles in several documents, presumably I have to save one document as a template?

Alan: Yes. Creating a template with the styles would be the way to do it.

Ian

12 months ago

Gary, can I ask whether it is possible to use Styles to include automated report heading numbering. I am trying to use Pages more and more but have not yet found a way to create a report style document with automatic heading numbering. Thank you for your help

Ian: Do you mean like having Headings that start 2.1, 4.3.5 and such? You could set each one up as a numbered list, even though it is one line. Then use “Continue from previous” to have the numbers increase with each line that is a heading. For small documents it would be easier to number them manually. But for long documents if you are adding sections and want the numbers to all update automatically, it could be useful.

Tom

4 months ago

Dear Gary,
I tried this Paragraph changing already by myself as you also show in this tutorial, but it just won’t work. If I put the cursor on the wished line and select any paragraph style(Heading; body; etc) it changes instead the only line the whole text on the page to that style. What can I do?

With the best,
Tom

Tom: It will change the style for the paragraph. If you want to change for multiple paragraphs, select them all.

Carolyn

Gary – is there any way to automatically to make numbering/bulleting a part of a style? Or to make sure if you are changing from a style that has has numbering/bulleting to a style that does not, that they are also removed?

This is a big pain in Pages, especially if you’ve come over from Word.

Thanks,
Carolyn

Carolyn: Bullet lists have their own styles that you can use. See https://macmost.com/creative-bullet-lists-in-pages.html

Glenn Cheney

3 months ago

When I try to apply a new style to a paragraph, all the italics and superscript (footnote numbers) disappear. How do I apply a new style without losing character styles?

Thanks for whatever you can tell me.

Glenn: It depends what is in the paragraph style. For instance, if the paragraph stye includes “bold” as part of its definition, then all text in the paragraph will be styled bold. But if there is no bold/italic/plain part to the style, then it will not change bold/italic/plain for any of the text when you change the paragraph style.

Comments Closed.

How To Use Styles In Pages

Comments: 14 Responses to “How To Use Styles In Pages”

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