10/13/22
9:00 am

Learn How To Use Mac Pages In 5 Minutes

Learn how to create a Pages document and add text with formatting, line spacing, headers and footers and much more in this quick tutorial. If you need to get up to speed fast to start a report or paper, this tutorial is for you.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to use Mac Pages in 5 minutes.
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So Pages is Apple's own word processor. If you don't already have it on your Mac you can get it for Free from the Mac App Store. When you first run Pages you may see an open file dialogue like this. If you do click New Document or you may just start right here with Choose A Template. There are a variety of different templates for different purposes. Some may fit your needs and you could just start with those. We're going to start with a blank one right here and create a brand new document. 
Note that Pages has two modes. Word Processing Mode and Page Layout Mode. We're going to stick with Work Processing Mode for this tutorial. So with a blank document let's start off by typing a Title. We're going to change the style by going to the right sidebar. If you don't see the right sidebar you can click on this format button here. It will come up with the blinking cursor in that first line. Change the Style to something like Heading. Now we're going to press Return to go to the next line. Pages is smart enough to know to change the style to Body Text as you probably don't want two Heading lines right after each other. Now let's add some text here. 
So now we have our first paragraph of text. Let's select all this and set the font to exactly what we want. Still under Format, with Style selected here, we can go and change the Font. Let's change to something like this and make it a little bit bigger. Now we can see it is still set to Body Text but body with an asterisk. Let's update that with the Update button. Now that changes the body style to be this exact font. We can do the same thing here with this Heading. Let's go and change that and make it a little bit bigger, change the font, and now we'll Update the Heading style. Let's add some more text and another Heading line here. With the blinking cursor on this line I've change the style to make this Heading so it matches this one. Now add some more text. One of the advantages of using Styles rather than just selecting text and changing the font is that if I make a change to say this paragraph here, maybe I'll make it a little bit bigger, I can Update it and it updates all of the paragraphs that are set to body text. Let me do the same thing here with Heading. I can make this a little bit bigger. Maybe even change its color and update Heading and you could see how it does it for everything with that style. 
We could also change line spacing and paragraph spacing. So with my cursor in this paragraph I'm going to go and Format, Style down to Spacing. Increase the line spacing just a bit. Let's add some spacing after each paragraph. Now I change it for that paragraph updating the body style will update it for all of them. Let's also change the spacing after the Heading style right here and Update. You can also change Margins. For that go to the Documents Sidebar and then under Document you'll see Document Margins. So if I wanted more or less on the left margin I can change the value right here. I could also add Indent. I'm going to put the blinking cursor in this paragraph here. I'm going to go to Format and then I'm going to go to Layout. Here I've got Indent. If it isn't open you can click here and I can change, say, the first line to indent in a little bit like that. I could also go to View and then Show Rulers. I'll see the Rulers here and you could see the first line indent and the left side and right side indent. With this indentation on this paragraph now I could Update Body Text and you could see it is now true for all body paragraphs. If you ever need to Center something go to Format, Style. Let's go here to Heading and I can use this button right here to center the Heading. If I Update it will update for all of the paragraphs using that style. 
You can also set Headers and Footers for every page. Go to the top and you'll see three boxes. This is the Header. I could put something like My Name here and maybe the Document Title there. If I go to the bottom I'll find three boxes at the bottom here as well. I'll click there and I'm going to use the Insert Page Number button and just insert a page number. Now those are going to appear on every page. To force the text to start on a new page go to where you want that break to occur. Like just before this Heading here, and choose Insert and either Page Break or Section Break. You can see how that forces it to the next page here. If you want to add an Image you can use this Media button here. Use this to select something from your Photos Library or you can just drag and drop a file right into the document. I can then grab any corner to resize the image and I can just drag it from the middle to move it around. Notice how the text naturally flows around this image like that. 
Under Format, Style, with the image selected, you can now choose a preset style or setup your own style here using Line and Border options. You can add other elements as well including Shapes and Tables if you want to format data the right way or have a little mini spreadsheet in your document. You can have Charts as well. When you're done you could go to File, Print to send the document to your printer or you can go to File, Export To. Most likely you're looking to export the document as a PDF. But you can also export as Word Format or ePub Format if you like. 
So there are the basics. But there's a lot more to Pages. I have a ton of tutorials if you want to learn more.

Comments: 19 Responses to “Learn How To Use Mac Pages In 5 Minutes”

Richard Greene

2 years ago

Great lesson, as always, Gary. I'm stuck in a Microsoft world at the university where I teach and have to use Word. I've occasionally encounter some conflicts when I save a Pages document in the Word format. Is there any kind of list of things that saving a Pages document in Word will result in some kind of error or revision in the final Word document? Thank you.

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Richard: So why not just use Word? That's what I would do in that situation. Both apps are so deep you can't really create a definitive list like that.

Charles Bake

2 years ago

Absolutely amazing what you managed to fit in. Pages is just so good and is now my go-to app for word processing.

Paul Gardner

2 years ago

Gary - Can I set a default that will open a new document with the font values I want? I prefer Arial 14 pt, but new docs seem to always open on my iMac in Helvetic’s Neue 11 pt. Note that, on my iPad, my Arial preference is the default.

Please advise.

Paul

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Paul: Yes. See https://macmost.com/how-to-set-up-a-default-template-in-pages.html

Anthony Bober

2 years ago

Nicely done. Not sure it was a "five minute tutorial." If you had spoken at a more typical speed maybe 7-8 minutes. Funny, I started out on Claris many years ago, then switched to Windows for Mac to communicate better with all of my business clients. Now I am retired and back wanting to use Mac "suite of word processing" including "Numbers." Going to look for a quick tutorial on Numbers.

Umesh Kumar

2 years ago

Excellent. Was afraid to us pages as I have invested in Word for many years. Would try Pages now for little things.

Mark McCluski

2 years ago

Amazing: I've been using Pages for years. I looked at the video to get an idea on how to explain something to someone who is new to Pages. And boom, I learned two great things I never knew!

Caroline

2 years ago

Fantastic whistle-stop tour! Yes, Gary, when you say at the end that you have a ton of video tutorials to help us get the most out of Pages, that's absolutely right. And I'd also like to mention your fabulous Course on Pages—as a former Word user, I learnt a massive amount from that course, which was totally worth doing and is still a valuable resource that I come back to whenever I need a refresher on any aspect of the app.

Joe Grillo

2 years ago

Absolutely one of the best vignettes I've ever seen. Watched it twice and loved it both times.

Dennis Craig

2 years ago

Gary, with the new version of Pages 12.2, when I create a function key as a shortcut to do a bullet, Pages shows that the function key is selected correctly, but when I actually try to use the function key to insert a bullet, the computer just "beeps" and the function key does not give a bullet. I have used this shortcut for bullets for years. Have you experienced the same, or do you have an opinion on why it is not working? Thanks from a Patreon supporter!

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Dennis: Just tried it and the same result. Must be a bug.

nick

2 years ago

Hi Gary, I can't find a preference within Pages that deals how documents are saved. I opened a template I made, created something new with it then just closed it expecting Pages to ask me to save it and I would have chosen No. Instead it closed the document and it saved my new creation, which is not what I wanted to do, I like to save the template as is. Any suggestions? thx

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

nick: Are you trying to update the template, or save a new document based on that template? If the first, you need to use File, Save As Template to save the new version of the Template.

nick

2 years ago

Want to save the new document based on that template. Maybe I have the terminology wrong. I have a pages file with set margins, page size etc. I'm calling that a template, and I then use it to insert elements (graphics, text etc) and then save it as a new file, but always want to retain the template as I created it. When I closed the new file, I didn't want to save it to overwrite the template, but Pages did, without me saving it. Hope this make sense. thx

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Nick: Oh, so you aren't using an actual Pages Template? You should look into doing that. Turn your "Pages file" into a template and make it easy to use. (https://macmost.com/creating-templates-in-pages.html)
But also, you could simply Lock the Pages file you use as a template now, to force you to have to open it and then save a copy. Or, turn it into a Stationery Pad (https://macmost.com/creating-template-files-for-any-app-on-your-mac.html). I recommend the first idea since it works so well in Pages.

nick

2 years ago

thanks very much for the suggestions

Phil

2 years ago

Gary, thanks for the very good 5 min tutorial on Pages. I really like it and have referred to it several times to make me comfortable and knowledgeable with Pages. You go thru it quickly.......obviously to keep it to 5 mins.........but it's a very useful tutorial. Keep doing these short videos......very helpful!! Thanks much and Happy Thanksgiving!!

Deborah Ellis

2 years ago

I've learned so much from these. Keep up the great work!
I write a monthly newsletter dealing with family history, which is distributed locally. I like to include a link or two to each subject. I highlight to make them links, then highlight them using Insert>Highlight. They show up on the screen as yellow links, but they never print out yellow. The link feature is still attached, just not in the highlighted yellow. I'm using Pages on my 2-year-old Mac Mini, with an HP Officejet Pro 8620. If t

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Learn How To Use Mac Pages In 5 Minutes

Comments: 19 Responses to “Learn How To Use Mac Pages In 5 Minutes”

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