Mac Pages Is Actually Two Apps In One

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Did you know that Pages on your Mac isn't just one app but actually two apps!

So if you use Mac Pages it is important to realize that you have two separate modes. Depending upon which template you have selected when you start your document you're either using Pages in Word Processing Mode or Page Layout Mode. It is important to know which layout you're in and what the differences are. You might mostly just use one of those two modes but it is important to know the differences between them and why you might want to occasionally use the other. 

So here I have two Pages documents opened in two different windows. The one here on the left is a document in Word Processing Mode. The one here on the right is a document in Page Layout Mode. Word Processing Mode has some very special features that you may just take for granted. One is that text will flow from one page to the other. Notice here I just have one page and there is nothing on it. The text cursor is blinking there at the very top left corner on the page and I can type something there. This is exactly what you would expect from a word processor. You create a new document and you start typing. But if you keep typing and adding more and more lines what happens is when you get to the bottom of the first page you don't manually have to add in a second page. Look what happens here when I paste one half,the first page. Notice it automatically added a second page and the text continued on it. The text flowed from page one to page two. If I were to add something here, like an extra line, it pushes all the lines down and it goes from page one to page two just as you would expect. Probably something that we all take for granted as word processors have done this for decades. Likewise if I were to delete a bunch of paragraphs here you can see how page two disappeared. It is no longer needed. 

Here's a better sample of text and you can see it fills 5 pages. I didn't have to create any of these pages. It started with just page 1 and you can keep writing and it just keeps adding pages. This is because there is something on each page called Body Text. You can see it when you go to View and then Show Layout. You can see this box here around the text. It is on each page. I can jump to each page and I can see it there. That textbox is called Body Text. You didn't have to put it there. You don't have to create it. You didn't have to add it each time there was a new page. Body Text from page 1 automatically continues to page 2 and then continues to page 3 and so on. 

Now there are other special features of Word Processing Mode as well that you may also take for granted. For instance, I'm going to insert an image here. It is placed here in the text and it actually has an anchor in the text. The anchor can be seen right here. It is a blue line with a dot on the top. What's interesting about that is if I were to insert more text or just a blank line before the anchor you can see how the image moves with the text. So it will stay anchored in place in relation to this point here. You can change that by selecting the image going to the right sidebar here and then in going to Arrange and you've got Stay on Page, to make it stop doing that, so you can see it just will stay there now and you can have the text flow around it in certain ways or move with the text but also still have the text flow around in certain ways. 

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Another thing in Word Processing Mode is that the pages here on the left, well, they just contain text flowing from one to the other. You can't move these pages around. I can't move page 3 to before page 2.  However, you can arrange the contents of your document if you use Sections. So I'm going to put the cursor here just before this paragraph on page 3. I'm going to insert a Section Break. This is going to divide the document into two sections. I can now select each of these sections independently because they are two separate sections and I can actually move a section. I can move Section 2 ahead of section 1 if I want. So for instance when I'm writing if I want each section to be a chapter, subchapter, group of chapters, however you want to put it together and you can rearrange things using Sections. 

Also another thing you'll get in Word Processing Mode is Header and Footer fields. That's these boxes here at the top. I see them because remember I turned on Show Layout. So normally you wouldn't see them but they are there and you can click on them. You can insert any text you want in there. Like you can insert your name here, I could put the name of the book, like the title here and I can here if I click there it is actually going to prompt me if I want to put the page number there. I can select various different ways to select the page number. If I go to Page 2, you can see I've got name, I've got title, and I've got 2 out of 5 here and 3 out of 5 on the next page. 

But now let's go and look at the other mode, Page Layout Mode, which is this document here. This document there is nothing on the page. I can go to View and Show Layout and nothing appears. I have no Body Text. I've got no Header or Footer field. It is a completely blank page. If I type nothing happens. If I click to try to put the cursor some place nothing happens. This is just a blank page ready for you to add things to. If you want to put some text on it you would actually have to put a Textbox there. For instance Insert then Text or usually, if you've got more space up here, there's a button for Text. So you start a Textbox. You can put the textbox anywhere you want. You can type whatever. Add shapes, add images, whatever you want here. That's how Page Layout works. No matter what you do here it is not going to automatically add page 2. Instead you would add this button here that adds another page. You've got page 1 and page 2 and by default they are completely unrelated. 

So this page here as this text on it and then this page here we can go ahead and insert, say, a shape like a triangle, like that. We've got two separate pages. Since they are separate pages, not connected, we can actually reorder them. So it is really easy to reorder the pages, essentially each page is like its own separate section. 

So when should you use each one. Well Word Processing Mode, adds the name suggests, is for writing. So if you're writing something, book, a report, an article, or taking notes then you probably want Word Processing Mode. It allows you to write. It will keep adding pages as you write more. You can easily add page numbers. You can create sections if you need to have, say, chapters in a book, and it's what most people would use just if they want to write and do basic word processing. 

Page Layout Mode, well, is basically for everything else. If you want to create a sign, or brochure, or newsletter or anything that has a lot of page layout elements. A lot of graphics and a lot of design involved. If you writing you use Word Processing Mode. If you want design you use Page Layout Mode. But there is a lot of crossover. For instance, if you want to make a book Word Processing Mode seems to be the right mode. But that is just if you have a lot of flowing text. If you want to do something like say a children's book, a book with a lot of graphics, a kind of educational textbook, that would be Page Layout Mode. 

You can do Page Layout in Word Processing Mode. In the middle of your novel you can have a page that has lots of images, shapes, and other elements on it. There is nothing to stop you from using all of those designs elements in Word Processing Mode. Likewise in Page Layout Mode you can link together Textboxes to have text flow from one page to the next if you do it manually. That's what you usually do in newsletters when you have an article, say, that continues on another page. So how do you start with the right mode?

When you go to create a new document in Pages you're asked to choose from Template. There are two blank templates. One is called Blank and that's a blank word processing mode document. Another is called Blank Layout. That is a blank page layout document. These are the two primary templates that you use. But there a ton of other templates. Most of those are Page Layout templates. For instance, if you go down here to Certificates, or Newsletters, or Brochures these are all page layout documents. But there are some other word processing templates. For instance, Reports here has some word processing templates because a report can be many pages long. So it is going from one page to the next. But in general for starting off with a blank document it is Blank for Word Processing and Blank Layout for Page Layout. 

Now how do you tell which mode you are in? Well, if you're in Word Processing Mode and you go to File and you look here you'll see Convert to Page Layout. That's your clue that you are currently in Word Processing Mode. Whereas if you're in Page Layout Mode, like here, you go to File it says Convert to Word Processing. In other words convert to the opposite. Also, if you look here under the right Sidebar and you choose Document here you'll see Document Body. If that is checked that means you're in Word Processing Mode. Whereas here if I look at the right sidebar I can see Document Body turned Off. Now, of course, this menu item suggests that you can convert from one to the other. But only do so if you're absolutely sure you know what you are doing. Now converting from Page Layout to Word Processing that is going to go and add the Body Text to each page. You don't really loose anything and I can Undo and no harm done. But, in Word Processing Mode if you convert to Page Layout you're going to get a Warning. It's going to remove the Body Text. So if you've written a 500 page novel and it is all in Body Text and you use this command it is going to remove everything that is there! You can see it is all gone. The Body Text field is not there in Page Layout Mode. So you just basically deleted everything. Fortunately, you can command Z to Undo that conversion. 

So Word Processing Mode and Page Layout Mode are so different why couldn't Apple just create two apps? Well, there's a lot of crossover between these two modes. 90% of the rest of the stuff, like for instance paragraph and character style, handling of text and images, is the same between the two modes. So if there were two different apps you would probably have more people asking why are there two different apps and why aren't these just combined into one. Suppose you really only use Pages in one of those two modes. You don't want to have to choose a template each time. You can actually just set it up to just go right to the mode you want. 

So in Pages go to Settings and here you've got a setting, under General, for New Document. So it could show the Template Chooser. But you could also use a specific template. Change that and select what you want. So if you always just want to start in Word Processing Mode so you can get to writing right away, choose Blank. Select it right here and now when you use File, New it goes right to a brand new word processing document.

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.