Rearranging Sections In Pages

A useful new tool in Pages is the ability to create sections that can be rearranged easily. This will make it easier for those writing stories or scripts, compiling reports, or creating study notes. You can put multiple pages in a section and drag and drop the entire section to reorder your document.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On today's episode let's look at a new feature in Pages that allows you to rearrange things in your document using Sections.
So Apple recently released new versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. There are a lot of small new features in these. I'm going to look at one today. I'm using Pages version 5.6 and I'm just going to create a new blank document.
In the past I could certainly look at the page thumbnails here on the left and see what pages I've done but I couldn't really rearrange them. They are basically a way for me to jump from page to page.
Now, with Pages 5.6, I can actually rearrange them in a way that you might do say if you were writing a story and you want to have sections that you rearrange or perhaps a script or perhaps notes for class. Things like that and you kind of want to rearrange sheets of paper. You can do that using Sections.
So let's start off by just creating a bunch of pages that may have some notes on them. So here is three potential pages and I can easily select at the end here and insert a Page Break to create a new page. You can see these are on separate pages. But I'm not going to do that.
Instead I'm going to insert a Section Break. It seems to do the same thing. I get a the first page here and a second page with that. I'm actually going to insert another Section Break there. It seems like well I just have three pages. But there is a big difference.
The difference is notice when I select one of these I get this yellow outline. That is because one page is an entire section. By it being a section I can do something I can't do if these were simply pages. I can rearrange them. So I could take this one here, this one that had the text Page 2, and I click and drag it above and now I've rearranged these. So I start with Page 2, Page 1, and Page 3.
Now let's make this into a little nicer format so I can really work with it. So the first thing I'm going to do is grab this line here and I'm going to shrink it a bit so I can see more pages. Also I'm going to select all the text and I'm going to increase its size to something where I can see it a little easier. I want to make that larger right there. Since I've select All before they are all larger. Now I can kind of see them a little bit better here.
I also can change the size of the page here. So I'm going to do Horizontal there instead. I can even do a custom size or I can just do something like postcard. Now you can see I can see this a little bit better and I can see multiple ones on the screen at the same time. So they are easier to move around as notes. I can now rearrange these notes however I want over here. I can also Delete them as well.
I have one selected. I can hit the Delete key and you can see it will ask to confirm that delete right there. I can also insert a new one. I don't have to go and type more stuff here and then do Insert Section Break. I can actually click here and then Insert, Section and it will put a new section after the one I am currently in. So now I've go this one here and now these can all be rearranged.
Now since these are Sections, Sections can have multiple pages in them. So let's go here to this one, Page 3, and I'll actually add more text and you can see how it does it here on the left. I have this whole Section. I can select the entire thing at once and it moves together as a Section. So I can put it here at the end. So you can very easily have a lot more detail in one of these notes than in the rest of them. 
They can still all be moved around. This can be deleted here and it will tell me it is going to delete pages 1-4. So it is very useful if you have the things that are just one page worth of notes or you have some sections that are multiple pages worth of notes.

Comments: 4 Responses to “Rearranging Sections In Pages”

Linda Lyn

8 years ago

Thank you Gary
Yes it's very useful
I'm waiting for it now it's here.
Thank you for showing how to use it.
Your a wonderful teacher!

Print Path

OK Gary, this is PageGasmic!
I use pages for my Teacher pay Teachers shop and am still using Pages 4.5 because manipulating the order of the sheets is primary to my service. This update makes the newer Pages useful!!! I am thrilled, thanks for the information and your excellent teaching!

Kathy

Hi Gary, hopefully this is related to this topic......
I'm trying to convert an A4 poster into 2 x A5 in landscape. I've always done it in Pages 4.3 by setting it to Landscape then scaling down, but the scaling function seems to have disappeared in Pages 5.6. Can you help?
Many many thanks!
Kathy

Gary Rosenzweig

Do you mean the printing scale? You can set that in the latest version of Pages. Just go to File, Page Setup.

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Rearranging Sections In Pages

Comments: 4 Responses to “Rearranging Sections In Pages”

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