MacMost Now 547: Styles In Pages

Learn how to use Styles in iWork Pages. You can apply styles to paragraphs or characters, redefine styles already in place, and select all text that uses a specific style. Styles are an important tool for document creation in Pages.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode, let's look at using styles in pages. 
So, here is an example of a Pages documents. Now, we've got some sample text here. In order to bring up styles, I want to go to 'View' and 'Show Styles Drawer.' It will pop out from one side of the window. You can see there are paragraph styles, character styles and list styles. Now paragraph styles apply to the entire paragraph, while character styles can apply to a word, a series of characters, a sentence inside a paragraph; and the styles, of course, apply to lists.
Let's set a style here. Let's select this first line. I don't even have to select the entire thing. I just put the cursor inside of it and set it to the title style. I'll do the same for down here for this type. Now you'll notice that the paragraphs in between are already set to body style. You can see it here highlighted. Now if I wanted to change some styles, I could select some text here like this, and I could go to the fonts inspector and select something different. Let's say I wanted to use Times here instead of Helvetica. Now, I can change it to that. Now, I want to apply that style change to the entire style, so all of the paragraph set to body. So I can do that as a control-click on body right here. I'll get a menu here. You can see the first one is 'Create New Paragraph Style from the Selection,' 'Redefine Style from Selection,' or 'Revert to Defined Style.' Let's redefine the style from the selection. You can see what happens here is the body style has change. So all of the other paragraphs set to body style have changed to match that one. 
Now, let's do the same thing with character style. Say there were some words I want to point out here. We'll select a word, and I will change just that word by bringing up the font inspector here. I'll change that to be bolded and make it a slightly larger font as well. So what I want to do is create a character style from this. I will use this little pop-up menu here. The first one is 'Create New Paragraph Style.' The second one is 'Create New Character Style.' I'll select that, and I'll name it 'Special Words.' You can see it's added it there. Now I can select another word somewhere in here and mark that as 'Special Words.' The great thing is, of course, I can change one of them. So, I've selected this one, and I will change it to be italicized. Then, I will control + click and redefine the style from the selection, and you can see that it also changes it down here. Another cool thing that I can do is I can select everything that has a certain style. So, I want to select all the words that are special words. I can control-click here on 'Special Words' and select all uses of special words. You can see I have them all selected there as well. So, now I can do different things with playing with the styles of just that selection. I can do the same thing with the paragraphs here. I can go and control-click on title and select all uses of title. I can also, as you can see, rename the style, I can delete it, or I can assign a hot key, and it goes right off the screen here, but it's the F-keys here to the right that I can assign to any of these styles, F-1 through 8.
There's a quick look at using styles and pages. One of the best things I like about this is I can just go ahead and create a document and not have to worry about exactly what font types I'm going to be using. I just define styles for things that make sense, like titles and different types of paragraphs, and then when I'm done I can use these styles to play around with the look of the fonts and change the entire document at once.
I hope you found this useful. Until next time, this is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 547: Styles In Pages”

Pam Erskine

13 years ago

Hello Gary
I am trying to learn Paragraph Styles but you speak so fast I can't keep up. Probably because of your lovely American accent. Can you do a slow version for England please? RSVP

Gary Rosenzweig

There's a transcript. Look below the video for "Video Transcript (Click to Expand)." That might help. Of course it is in lovely American English too.

Tony Gold

I know what you mean! I have to rewind to get all the info if I take my eye off the ball...
BUT...the content is excellent, all useful and no blather. I feel really lucky to have found his site. A very bright boy, Gary...

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 547: Styles In Pages

Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 547: Styles In Pages”

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