Reusing and Copying Styles From One Document To Another In Pages, Numbers and Keynote

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can use Styles across documents in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. 

Here's a common problem. You've got a document like this in Pages. Let's say you customize the styles. For instance this first line here is using the default Title Style. But let's say I change the font, maybe I make it a little smaller, and maybe I even add some color. Now you can see the Title Style has been changed for this line. If I Update it will update the Title Style across the document. So notice this other line here is also using the Title Style. When I Update all of the lines that have the Title Style will Update to use this style right here, this font, this size, this color.

I can do the same thing with other paragraphs. Like, for instance, I can grab this one here. This is Body Text. If, say, I change this font as well. Maybe let's make it a tiny bit smaller. Let's increase the line spacing and maybe let's add a little bit of spacing before each paragraph and after each paragraph, like that. So now I have my new style here for the body. If I Update all the other body paragraphs will update as well. So that's really useful. Maybe I even go a bit further and I have a special character style, like if I selected this word I'll go and make that Bold and maybe I'll make that a different color, like this. Let's go ahead, click Character Styles here and click the Plus button to add a new character style. We'll call this Important. I can use that somewhere else. I can select this here and, say, Important. So now I've got some interesting styles and I like these. I need to produce a series of documents using these. 

If I create a new document here, I choose the Blank Template, and I start typing something and maybe I'll make this the Title Style. Notice it's using the default Title Style. It's not using this one. That's what I want. So how do I get it so when I create a new document it remembers my Styles from another document? 

The way to do that is to create a Template. It's not as complex as it sounds. It's actually pretty easy here. We've got this document and I'm going to Save it and now I'm going to create a template from it. So a good first step is to duplicate it. Not to work with this one. So I'm going to go to File, Duplicate right here. Now I've got a different document. I'm not going to worry about the name of the document. You can see it is saving it here to the same location as the original. I'm going to go in here and I'm going to clear everything out. This document, being a duplicate of the first one, has this unique Title Style. It's got this unique Body Style. It's got that special style I created that's a character style called Important. If I just select everything and Delete it's a blank document now. Notice that the initial spot right here where I might start typing something, that's just Body Text. I can set that to what I want. If I want it to be Title Text here at the beginning I can. I'm going to leave it as Body Text. So, I'm looking this over and I'm confirming that everything is just like I want it to be when I start a new document. I've got my special styles. It's blank. I have Body Text set right here as the initial style. We're ready to go! This is how I want all my documents to look when I start them. 

So now I'm going to go to File and then Save As Template. This allows me to either save it as a document with the Save Button so there's a special file that I can double click on and it will open up a new document with this style. But what I want to do is Add to Template Chooser. That will add it to this big template chooser but it is going to be at the bottom under My Templates. I can call it what I want. So I can call it My Docs or whatever it is. You can have as many of these as you want. So you can have different ones for different purposes. 

So now when I go to create a New Document in Pages, it will go to Choose A Template. If I go to the bottom or click on My Templates here, I'll see the new template I created. After I use it the first time it's going to be all the way at the top here under Recents. So I'll easily be able to select it. Probably just as you select Blank right now. So for the first time I'm going to select it from under My Templates and now I get a New Document. Notice when I type here it is using the Body Text, just like I specified, and I can change it to the Title Text, like that. Go down here and there's Body Text and I can type more things and I can even select it and go to Character Styles here and there's that Important style that I created. So it's remembering not only changes to the styles like Body and Title but any new styles that I would create, either under Paragraph Styles or Character Styles. It's all remembered and all saved in the template. So now when I go to create a New Document you can see that template appears here as the most recent one and I can select it. I can also skip this whole step here by going to Pages, Settings, and under General I can select For New Documents Use a Template and I can select the template I just created. Now when I create a new document it skips the Document Chooser and just uses that default template right here. 

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It works basically the same way in Numbers. Here I've used the Blank Template to create a Numbers document. But let's select this cell here and under text I'm going to make this Bold and maybe a little bit bigger and I'm going to Update the Table Style right there. So now if I enter into another cell you can see it is using that same style. Let's create a New Table style by, say, selecting the Header Row here and I'm going to go to Cell and let's make this a Color like that. I'm going to select the Header Column, like that, I'll double click it to just select these cells, and I'll select a different color there. Let's go to Table and then you see the Styles here. I'm going to click on the little arrow here to go to the next page and use the Plus Button to add a new Table Style there. I can continue to customize styles in all sorts of different ways here. 

But let's say this is how I want things in the next document I create as well. So I can go to File, Duplicate here so I'm not working with the original. Then I'm going to Delete this first table here. I'm going to insert a new one if I even want to start with a new table. I may just want to have it start blank. But I'm going to have it start with a new table like this. I'm going to select that Table Style I created right there. Notice that if I enter a number in here it enters in that Table Style 2 that was created there. I'll clear it out there  so it is blank. Maybe I even want to customize this. I only want this to be four columns and maybe five rows, like that. So I get it like I want and this is how I want to start my Numbers documents. I go to File, I go to Save As Template, Add to Template Chooser, and I'll call it My Doc, like that or whatever you want. Now when I create a new document in Numbers I can choose that from My Templates there. There we go. We've got the Table that's 4 x 5, just like I wanted. We've got the special styles saved here. We've got the Text Style saved like I want. Bold, 11pt there. So it remembers everything just like I want it. 

In Keynote, instead of templates, these are called Themes. So I'm just going to choose Basic Black here and start a new presentation. I'm going to add a bunch of slides here. I'm just going to use the Statement Slide here because it is just one element. Then I'm going to add some text to each one of these. So let's say I want now to customize the text on each of these slides. If I select the text here I can see that under Format, Text this is called Statement. I can change what that style is. So I can do that. I can make this, say, a different text color, like blue like that. I can Update and it will update across all of these. I can also go to View and then Edit Slide Layouts. Here I see all the different slide layouts. This is what you get when you click Add Slide, it gives you all of these templates here. So there's the Statement one. I can actually change things here as well. Let me go ahead and make this red, for instance. I can update the style. I can do something like maybe move this to the top. Notice when I do that and I click Done, it updates the template for the Statement slide across all of the ones where I've used it. If I want to use this same set of customization in my next document I just save it as a template. Except that it is called Save Theme here. Just like before duplicate this document here and then I'm going to clear things out. I'm going to get rid of all of these slides here. So I'll delete them. It's going to put a slide here at the beginning. Which one is this? Well, it's the first one. 

So let's say I don't want to start with this. Let's say I want to start with a statement slide. I can go to View, and Edit Slide Layouts, like this, and this is my Statement one down here. I'm going to drag this up to the top, so it is the first one. Then click Done. Now, if I were to delete this first slide you can see it's going to use the first one in the list as the default slide there to fill the gap because you can't have a Keynote Presentation without at least one slide. Then go to File and instead of Save Template, it's Save Theme. Choose that and it works the same. It's going to add to the Chooser here. I'll call it My Template. Now when I create a new document in Keynote I can choose that from My Themes here at the bottom. Now it will appear there as the most recent one. Just like Pages, both Numbers and Keynote can be set to use a specific template or theme for a new document instead of showing the Chooser. 

So one last thing I want to show you is what if you start a new document and you're just using a default template but now you decide you want to bring the styles over from this document to this document. Well, there's no easy way to do it. But you can do it by simply selecting a style you like, like this Title Style here. Then choose Format and Copy Style or Option Command C. Then.go to this document here and then you can use Format, Paste Style or Option Command V. You paste it there and then you can Update. So it is a few steps but it can be done. The same thing here with Body Text. I can select this. I'm going to use Option Command C and then I'm going to go here. Then I'm going to use this Paragraph here. I'm going to choose one that doesn't have a special character style in it. I'm going to Option Command V to paste it in. Then I'll click Update to update the Body Style for that special character style. I'll do Option Command C here to copy the style. Option Command V here and you can see that since this was a special style it actually puts it there. Important wasn't one of the default styles but it shows there. But it won't show here in the list unless you add it. So you can see now I've added it there and now it is ready to be used elsewhere. 

So pretty quickly I've brought over the styles from this document to this document since I forgot to start this document with a template.

Now there is another way to do it that's a little messier. I'm going to go the end of this document here. Just put a few blank lines. I'm going to Copy enough of this document to include all of these styles here. Then I'm going to go over here and Paste. It's going to paste with all this stuff with the proper styles. So now I can choose this here and say Update. It will Update the Title Style and notice it changed it up here. I can choose this right here for the Body Style and say Update and it's going to update the body style here above. I can even choose this and let's say let's add this Character Style here and now I'll add it to the list. I don't have anything assigned here to that Character Style. So I would have to, maybe, use it one time, like that, to test it. But I was able to pretty quickly bring everything over that way. Now that I've done it I can select all this stuff here, that was useful in transporting the styles, but that is text from another document and I don't need it. So it is a little messy but you can see it is fewer steps and if you have a ton of different styles it might be a quick way to bring it over. 

The same thing, kind of, for Numbers and Keynote. Bring a table from one Numbers document to another. You get some of those styles and if you bring slides from one document to another you kind of get those styles and can add them to the themes if you like. But you have to do it in kind of a thoughtful organized way thinking about bringing over those styles carefully. Maybe it is worthwhile duplicating the document before you do all of that just so you have one to fall back on if you mess up while copying  the styles. 

Hope you found  this useful. Thanks for watching.