MacMost: iWork

By setting a soundtrack to your Keynote presentation and then recording the presentation you can create a slideshow timed to music. You can use Keynote's special transitions and effects to make the slideshow interesting and unique. You can then export the presentation as a video.

In addition to some standard shapes, you can create your own custom shapes in Pages using a series of points. These custom shapes can be used to wrap text around images in creative ways.

You can use the page layout functionality in Pages to frame your photos in various ways using borders, frames, shapes and reflections. You can print these framed photos, or export them as PDF files.

You can hide rows and columns in Numbers to effectively filter your data. Hiding can be done one row or column at a time, or by groups of rows and columns. You can also set criteria for rows or columns to be automatically filtered, allowing you to see only the data you need.

If you don't have Numbers, you can use Pages to create simple spreadsheets. Just use the tables inside Pages to create small spreadsheets that can use formulas to perform calculations. You can even sort and use basic and conditional formatting.

Take a quick look at iBooks Author, the new tool from Apple that lets you create textbooks for the iPad. You can design and layout pages like in iWork Pages. You can also add special elements like photo galleries, quizzes, 3D objects and interactive images.

Two transitions in Keynote allow you to animate between similar slides. The Magic Move transition will animate the positions between objects from one slide to the next. This give you infinite variation and also allows you to create simple motion graphics for use in videos. The Anagram transition allows you to create an interesting build between two pieces of text.

Sometimes you need to place a watermark, like the word DRAFT or CONFIDENTIAL, behind text in a document. You can do this using text boxes that are made into background items and then set them to appear across all pages in the document.

You can use the COUNTIF function to count the number of times an item appears in a column. You can also use COUNTIFS to total the number of rows based on several conditions in several columns. The SUMIF and SUMIFS functions will give you the total of the rows in another column based on the same criteria.

You can create nice-looking printouts from Numbers, but the options to do so aren't always obvious. Learn how to view your spreadsheets in layout view, adjust scaling, darken borders and use styles and design elements to create nicer Numbers printouts.

Tab stops allow you to align text in word processing programs. They have been around for a while, but if you have only started using word processors recently, you may have overlooked them in favor of tables and other layout elements. Tab stops are a quick and easy way to display data neatly inside a document.

There are many options for formatting cells in iWork Numbers. You can choose the number of decimal places, or use fractions. You can format as currency or choose a different base system. You can choose from a variety of date and time formats. You can also create steppers, sliders and pop-up menus to make it easy to change values to cells. Conditional formatting allows you to have cells that change color and style with certain values or ranges.

You can control a Keynote presentation on a Mac with your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad using the Keynote Remote app. But this requires that both the Mac and iOS device be on the same wi-fi network. In cases where you don't have a wi-fi network, such as a presentation hall or classroom, you can establish your own local network using your Mac, and connect to it with your iOS device. This allows you to control the Keynote presentation directly from your device to the Mac.

By using hyperlinks you can create a simple quiz game in Keynote. Links can take the user to a different slide depending on which answer they click. These quiz presentations can be exported as PDFs or HTML for web sites.

Learn how you can add hyperlinks to text and graphics in Keynote. Links can jump to web pages or other slides in a presentation. You can also link to other presentations or create a link to send an email.

Learn how to use if statements in formulas in iWork Numbers. You can combine these with checkboxes and pop-up menus to create results based on conditions. Useful for solving problems and bookkeeping.

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.

You can have Pages automatically create a table of contents based on the styles you have assigned to paragraphs in your text. With a little more work you can also have the table of contents automatically insert numbers and subchapters.

While you can't add text or shapes to a photo in iPhoto, you can do it using either Pages or Preview. Pages allows you to add a variety of shapes and even other photos. Preview allows text and simple shapes.

Learn how to do basic page layout in iWork Pages. By starting with a page layout template instead of a word processing template you can easily add text blocks, titles and images. You can flow text from one box to another.