MacMost Now 799: Useful and Fun Pages Templates

Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let's take a look at some of the more interesting, fun and useful templates in Pages. 

You know a lot of people use Pages as a word processor or for something very specific like doing a newsletter. So they skip over the screen that shows you all these cool templates you can use in Pages. I'm guilty of this myself. But when I recently wrote my book, "My Pages", I had to investigate every nook and cranny in the program and I looked at all these templates. There are some really cool interesting things there that it is worth knowing about.

So here is the Template Chooser. You can choose between Word Processing and Page Layout templates or simply list all of them. There are some really cool things if you take the time to look.

For instance, let's go right into Certificates. Certificates are kind of neat. There are only two of them here. But these can be kind of fun because you select one and it will instantly create this certificate and you can fill in different things. So they can be fun for families to say give your kids an award for doing something good or give out monthly awards in the family for doing chores, doing nice things for other people. It is kind of fun to do certificates and they have been around a long time on computers in different Print Shop-like applications. It is nice to know you can print off a quick certificate in Pages.

Another useful one is Flyers. You've got all sorts of different Flyers and you see they look actually a lot nicer than the some of the ones you see posted around your neighbor, probably. It is very easy to actually post different things. So for instance if you wanted to do a For Sale one you can see that you have a drop image here. You can just drag and drop whatever item it is you are trying to sell and in addition to that you've got these little tear-offs down here at the bottom with phone numbers so you can fill them out. Now the weird thing is that because of the way Pages works it doesn't really have the ability to just duplicate this across so you do one and it doesn't copy to the others. So all you have to do is Select All inside one of these boxes, select the next one and paste, select the next one and paste. It takes a minute and them you can print out one of these cool flyers in color or black and white depending on your printer, and create a quick For Sale, or For Rent, or whatever poster that is easy to do. It probably only takes a minute to make one of these. 

Another template that is fun is under Cards & Invitations. You've got all these interesting little cards that you can print up and you can see that it actually does it on two sides. Let's reduce the size here so you can see the actual card here. So it is kind of neat. You can print it out and fold it like you want or print it out a two-sided, if your printer supports that, and then actually get things in the correct size. You have all sorts of card templates that you can choose from. You can experiment with them and see how maybe you could use them.

Now as for the rest, they are pretty much the things you would expect. For instance these different newsletters. You can roll over with your cursor and see all the different pages if you want before you open it up. You've got brochures for instance. So there is really no excuse if you are going to have something that requires a brochure or newsletter for not creating at least a quick one from here. Professionally you probably get a professional company or designer to create one for you. But for creating ones on a tight budget or just as a fun things you can certainly use these templates.

To show you how easy it is to do one of these let's choose Museum Brochure. Let's say you just want to create a custom thing. You are doing kind of a school exhibit or somethings and you want to make it look good. If you want to change these images it is so easy. Bring up the Media inspector and then you can deal with your photos in your iPhoto Library or you can just drag and drop from the Desk Top as well as drag and drop from this window. You can put whatever images you want in these boxes. You can select any text and change the text to whatever you want. So you can very quickly go through this, change the headlines, change the text, drag and drop a bunch of images to it and you have something that is completely customized although it is using the same layout. Which means you can create and brochure or a poster or whatever in just minutes really rather than actually having to come up with a design that may take hours or days.

You don't have to settle for just the templates that come with Pages. If you search the Mac App Store you will find out there is a whole bunch of Pages template sets that you can buy and then when you buy them you are basically installing them inside of Pages. So you can get a lot more. You can also search the web for ones that are available in the Mac App Store.

So I hope this has gotten you thinking a little bit about looking through the Pages templates and seeing if there is something there that you can use either for fun or for business.

Until next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.