Moving Pages or Text Around in Mac Pages

When working in Pages you may want to move pages around to reorder them. The key to doing that is to use sections in Word Processing mode, or to use Page Layout mode instead, where each page is its own section.

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Video Transcript:  Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to can move pages around in Mac Pages. 
So a question I often get concerning Pages is somebody asking how can they move the pages in their document around. This can be confusing because there are many different ways to use Pages. Somebody may use it to write one long piece of text, like a novel. Another person may use it to create newsletters and another person may use it to create reports. 
It is important to realize there are two modes in Pages. Pages is like kind of two apps in one. The first mode is Word Processing Mode and the second mode is Page Layout Mode. Depending upon which one you're using Pages behaves very differently. So, for instance, here I am in Pages and I'm going to create a new document. Notice that I have lots of templates to choose from. The main one that you probably use most of the time is Blank. Blank will create a new word processing document. But another one is Blank Layout and this one actually creates page layout document. 
When you create a word processing document the main difference is something called the Body Text. We can see it here if I turn on View and then Show Layout. You're going to see this big text box that is in the middle of this page and I can just type directly into it. I can keep typing into it. What will happen is when I fill up page 1 it will automatically create page 2. So, for instance, I'm here at the bottom of page 1 and I press Return to go to the next line. You can see there's no room for it here on page 1. When I do it it creates a second page and it keeps going. The body text goes from page 1 to page 2 to page 3 all the way through your document. It's how you would use a word processor if you were typing up a long report, an essay, a novel, any general word processing task. So, for instance, here's an entire book inside of Pages. If I scroll down you can see it goes from page 1, to page 2, to page 3 and it keeps going through the entire document.  This is one big block of text. If I turn on Show Layout you can see the Body Text here in the middle and it basically links the body text from page 1 to page 2 and then to page 3 and so on. It is one long block of text going from page to page and it will keep expanding as you add more text. 
So if we go over here to View and turn on Page Thumbnails we'll see all the pages here.  Here's page 1, 2, 3 and we can scroll all the way through and see there are 103 pages here. We can jump to any page we want by clicking on a thumbnail here. So here's page 51. But page 51 is just a continuation of the text from page 50 and then it continues onto page 52. So if you wanted to rearrange pages it wouldn't make any sense to actually drag the thumbnails here. If you wanted to put page 52 before page 51 you can't drag it and put it before. It just won't work. The idea is you don't use the page thumbnails on the left to drag pages around. Instead you deal directly with the text. Say I wanted to take some text, like maybe a few paragraphs here on this page, and I wanted to move it earlier I could select it all and then click and drag it and move it up and down in the text. More likely I'm going to want to select it and then use Command X or Cut, remove it from there, move it to where I want it to be and then Command V to Paste it there. You can do this with whole pages of text. 
So, for instance, if I went down here to page 13 you could see this starts Chapter 2. Let's say I wanted to rearrange this so chapter 2 came after chapter 3. I could start the selection here and then I can go to end of chapter 2, which is right here. I can select it All, like that. I Shift Click to select the whole range. Then I could Cut all of chapter 2 and now I can go somewhere else and then I could Paste that in. 
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A better example may be this document. In this document if I look at the page thumbnails you can see that each page just has one paragraph of text and a heading on it. So this could be some sort of report that is in this kind of format. Let's say you wanted to switch the second and third pages. So what you would do here is select all of, say, the 3rd page and then Cut, then go before the 2nd page and Paste. Now I've successfully done that. 
Notice here that the reason that these paragraphs are on individual pages is because I put a Page Break after each one of these. If I go to View and then Show Invisibles I can see the page break right here. So it's not a standard return which would just look like this. It is this blue line with this little page icon here showing that I inserted a page break. You can do that by using Command and Return or simply Insert Page Break. This forces the next line to start on a new page. You can see each page just like this. So you would think that since there are page breaks and each in its own individual page that you should be able to actually drag these pages around to reorder them. 
In fact you can make Pages work like that. But, you need to use Sections, not pages. So right here instead of this page break I'm going to insert a Section Break. When I do that I still get that page break here. So I'm going to delete that page break. I don't need it anymore. So now I've got a Section Break. You can see the icon is different here. It looks like a little book. Then I'm going to do the same thing for each one these pages. I'm going to insert a Section Break, which I should have done in the first place, and delete the page break turning each one of these into a Section rather than a Page. Now that I've done that my document essentially looks about the same. I just have Section Breaks instead of page breaks. But Section Breaks still work to go to the next page. So from a visual standpoint they look the same. The difference is now that each of these pages is its own section I can actually drag these thumbnails. I can drag this second page, which is the second section, and move it after the third section, like that. I can drag these sections around anyway I want. So the key in this situation is to use Sections, not Pages. 
The same thing here in this document. I've got multiple chapters. What I've done is at the end of each chapter I've put a Page Break and then a new Heading there on the new page. Instead what I should have done, if I want to rearrange things easily, is to have a Section Break at the end of each chapter. Then delete the Page Break. Do that for each chapter. So now that I've done that I can drag and drop sections here. Each section is multiple pages. When I grab it and start dragging notice the sections collapse. All the pages are grouped together. So the first section here is 12 pages, then 9, then 12 and so one. I can drag and reorder the sections. So you can reorder sections even if they are multiple pages. 
Now what about Page Layout. If you do create a Page Layout document, like the blank template here, then every time you add a new page then each page is its separate thing. If you go and View the layout you'll notice there is no body text. Nothing shows here. If you want to actually put text on this you need to click the Text Box button there and then add text to that text box. So here's a text box that's on this page here. But no matter how much I type in this it's not going to continue onto another page. If I wanted to I would have to actually link the text boxes. That's a whole other thing. But if I want to add a second page I would use this Add Page button that only appears when you're working with a page layout document. Click that and now you've got a second page and you can do a third page, fourth page, as much as you want and put different elements on each page. You can put images. You can put text. Whatever you want on each page. This is how things like newsletters are created in Pages. You can see here the newsletter template is actually two pages here, each with different text boxes and elements in it and they are separate from each other. If you create a new page it just adds a blank page here at the end. All of these are independent. 
When you do use Page Layout, since each page is independent, it acts as its own section. Notice there is no way to insert a section here in Page Layout mode because a page and a section are the same thing. I can select any page I want and drag it into any position in the document. It's one page per section and completely moveable.
So what if you started in Word Processing Mode like this document here. You decide, well I really should be in Page Layout Mode for this. What can you do? You can go to File, and then Convert to Page Layout. You're going to see this warning here because what converting to Page Layout means is that the Body Text is removed. It can no longer link from page to page so the body text is just gone. Since this is all in body text it means your document would loose all the things that you've added to it. So your best bet here is to actually start a New Document. Make it Page Layout and then Copy and Paste text from the body text in the word processing document into text boxes in the Page Layout document. Then remember to use the appropriate document the next time that you want to make a similar thing. 
So I hope this helps you if you need to create a Pages document where the contents need to be moved around and rearranged inside it. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 5 Responses to “Moving Pages or Text Around in Mac Pages”

John C.

2 months ago

Good one. Thanks.

Sheldon

Thanks bunches

Adam Bezark

Man, you always manage to teach me something! I thought I knew Pages pretty well - and we use both Word Processing and Page Layout modes. But I didn't know that adding a Section Break in WP mode makes it act like a hybrid, halfway between WP and PL mode. Fascinating.

Another document structuring tip: try using the Styles panel to organize a document. I believe a paragraph style can even include a page break before or after it?

John Baker

Thanks, Gary. That was very helpful. Pages is not intuitive, at least not to me. Now if I can only remember to use section breaks, I should be good.

Andrea Grasselli

Finally I understand the difference between word processing and page layout! Thank you Gary!