iWork '05: The Missing Manual

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With all the talk about Pages' collection of gorgeous, colorful templates and its streamlined page-layout abilities, it's easy to forget that beneath the program's stylish veneer beats the heart of a regular word processor. One of the great things about Pages is its ability to let you produce extravagantly formatted productions or simple text documents—the choice is yours. Whatever the final form, the basic techniques you use to create, format, and edit those documents are the same.

When you launch Pages, the program greets you with a blank document window and an unfurling Template Chooser sheet (Figure 1-1). Apple's professional designers filled this pantry with a delicious array of templates, preformatted documents you can use to get a head start on your next writing project. Here you can choose to start your document from scratch with a blank page (by choosing the Blank template) or use one of the 40 starter documents (by choosing any of the other templates).

Pages responds by opening a new document window based on your chosen template and gives it the name "Untitled." In addition to giving you lots of design options in this document smorgasbord, these templates are built to last. When you choose a template, Pages actually opens a clone of the original. That way, you can work on your copy, safe in the knowledge that the blueprint is locked away—unmodified—ready for the next time you need it. (You can modify those templates if you really need to, and you can create more templates of your own. For all the ins and outs of template creation and manipulation, see Chapter 7.)

If you just need to get out a quick letter, shopping list, or note, choose the Blank template and start typing away. Then save or print and you're done. The next section covers the bare bones of word processing with Pages.

Figure 1-1: In order to view the available templates, click the categories listed on the left side of the window, or leave "All" selected to view the entire collection. Use the scroll bar on the right side of the window to see all the template images in that category. To make your selection, simply double-click the template image or its title, or, if you like to do things in a more roundabout fashion, click the template once, and then click Choose (or press Return).

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When you launch Pages, the program greets you with a blank document window and an unfurling Template Chooser sheet (Figure 1-1). Apple's professional designers filled this pantry with a delicious array of templates, preformatted documents you can use to get a head start on your next writing project. Here you can choose to start your document from scratch with a blank page (by choosing the Blank template) or use one of the 40 starter documents (by choosing any of the other templates).

Pages responds by opening a new document window based on your chosen template and gives it the name "Untitled." In addition to giving you lots of design options in this document smorgasbord, these templates are built to last. When you choose a template, Pages actually opens a clone of the original. That way, you can work on your copy, safe in the knowledge that the blueprint is locked away—unmodified—ready for the next time you need it. (You can modify those templates if you really need to, and you can create more templates of your own. For all the ins and outs of template creation and manipulation, see Chapter 7.)

If you just need to get out a quick letter, shopping list, or note, choose the Blank template and start typing away. Then save or print and you're done. The next section covers the bare bones of word processing with Pages.

Figure 1-1: In order to view the available templates, click the categories listed on the left side of the window, or leave "All" selected to view the entire collection. Use the scroll bar on the right side of the window to see all the template images in that category. To make your selection, simply double-click the template image or its title, or, if you like to do things in a more roundabout fashion, click the template once, and then click Choose (or press Return).

If you've used a computer at all, you already know everything you need to create, save, and print a Pages document. Here's a quick run-through of what you need to do to produce a very basic document, say, a shopping list:

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When the blank document window appears (Figure 1-4), your first thought might be, "Where is everything?" Apple's software designers have pared the document window down to the bone, opting for a Danish-modern starkness instead of the rococo of most word processing programs. Despite this minimalist design, Pages gives you easy access to the commands you're most likely to need by placing them at the top of each page, while keeping the ones you need less often—or for more esoteric tasks—hidden just below the surface.

You can choose to live with this minimalist window design, you can embellish it with more controls, or you can give the window a virtual makeover to express your own sense of style. However you wish to view your document window, mastering the placement of various tools and controls is the first step to creating and editing great Pages documents.

Gracing the top of the document window with its colorful buttons is the toolbar. The toolbar gives you one-click access to common commands, saving mileage on your mouse and strain on your memory by keeping these items right in front of you at all times. You'll learn more about each of these buttons in the coming chapters, but here's the condensed version for the standard button set:

Pages. The first button is a pop-up menu (as indicated by the tiny black triangle next to the icon) that lets you add additional pages to your document. If you're using the Blank template, clicking this button just adds another blank page. But most of the other templates provide a variety of coordinated page designs you can choose from (see Section 4.1.1.1).
Columns. Next is another pop-up menu that lets you change the number of text columns in your document. Pages can create from one to four newspaper-style columns across the page, so that the text flows from the bottom of one column to the top of the next (Section 3.4).
Style. The Style pop-up menu lets you quickly apply paragraph styles contained in the template or that you've added to the style collection—for example, a headline style, a subhead style, and a body style (Section 3.2).

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As in any word processor, editing in Pages involves a handful of simple techniques endlessly repeated: scroll up and down to read through the text. Click to place the insertion point where you want to insert or delete words. Type to replace characters, words, and sentences. Shift the order of passages using the Cut, Copy, and Paste commands. Use the mouse to move words and passages (see Section 1.3.4.1), and so on.

Your first editing task is just learning how to move around in your document. You won't have any difficulty with a one-page letter, but a 95-page manifesto presents more of a challenge.

Of course, you can use the vertical scroll bar at the right edge of every Pages window, as in any computer program (see Figure 1-8). And if you've replaced your one-button Apple mouse with one that has a scroll wheel (an essential upgrade, by the way, if you're into working quickly), you can use it to scroll, as well.

You can also use OS X's little-known Scroll to here option. If you think of the vertical scroll bar as a diagram of your document, from the first page to the last, you can Option-click anywhere on the scroll bar and the document jumps directly to that point. For example, Option-click three-quarters of the way down the scroll bar and Pages jumps to a point three-quarters of the way through your document.

You can also move up or down an entire page at a time by clicking the large upward-and downward-pointing arrows at the bottom of the window next to the page indicator.

True efficiency experts dismiss all this mousing around as so much wasted motion when there are perfectly good navigation keys right on the keyboard. Table 1-1 reveals all.

Table 1-1: Pages Keyboard Shortcuts
Press this	To do this
Page Up

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Composing basic text documents on your computer dramatically morphed into desktop publishing in 1985. Magic happened that year when publishers big and small loaded up the new Macintosh with Aldus PageMaker software and connected the whole rig to the even newer PostScript laser printers. Suddenly anyone could create and print formatted text documents. No longer did you need a typesetting machine to produce beautiful (or dreadful) pages containing fonts of different sizes and styles. Done with panache or with amateurish abandon, formatting is what separates modern computer word processing from Remingtons, Underwoods, and WordPerfect for DOS. This chapter covers everything you need to know about formatting your documents and introduces you to Pages' built-in spell checker.

Pages divides its formatting abilities—the variety of ways it can modify your text and the overall document's appearance—into five formatting categories: Character, Paragraph, Layout, Section, and Document.

Character (or font) formatting includes all the modifications you can apply to each individual character: font, size, style, and color. You can make these changes to single characters or to words, paragraphs, entire pages, or the whole document—whatever you've highlighted before applying the formatting commands described below.
Paragraph formatting modifies the way a paragraph or group of paragraphs appear, including line spacing, tabs, indents, and bullets and numbering. Since this formatting applies to the entire paragraph, you need only have the insertion point somewhere within the paragraph before applying the formatting—you don't have to highlight the entire paragraph. (See Paragraph Formatting, Section 2.1.1.4.)
Layout formatting controls the number, size, and spacing of columns and page margins for your document's layout. Layouts are one way you can subdivide your document to create, for example, two columns in one part, three columns in another, and wider margins in another. (See Layout Formatting, Section 3.4, for the full story.)

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Pages divides its formatting abilities—the variety of ways it can modify your text and the overall document's appearance—into five formatting categories: Character, Paragraph, Layout, Section, and Document.

Character (or font) formatting includes all the modifications you can apply to each individual character: font, size, style, and color. You can make these changes to single characters or to words, paragraphs, entire pages, or the whole document—whatever you've highlighted before applying the formatting commands described below.
Paragraph formatting modifies the way a paragraph or group of paragraphs appear, including line spacing, tabs, indents, and bullets and numbering. Since this formatting applies to the entire paragraph, you need only have the insertion point somewhere within the paragraph before applying the formatting—you don't have to highlight the entire paragraph. (See Paragraph Formatting, Section 2.1.1.4.)
Layout formatting controls the number, size, and spacing of columns and page margins for your document's layout. Layouts are one way you can subdivide your document to create, for example, two columns in one part, three columns in another, and wider margins in another. (See Layout Formatting, Section 3.4, for the full story.)
Section formatting involves page numbering, header and footer placement, and Master Objects (repeating elements that appear on every page of a section). (Section Formatting, Section 3.5.3.)
Document formatting incorporates overall page margins and the footnote setup for the whole document. (Document Formatting, Section 2.1.4.)

Character formatting—also called font formatting—controls the appearance of a single letter, a word, a paragraph, or even an entire document. You'll find controls for adjusting character formatting in four places within Pages: the Font panel, the Text Inspector, the Format menu, and the shortcut pop-up menus (Figure 2-1).

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One of the most apreciated features of the modern word processor is its ability to corect embarassing misspellings. Pages still can't tell an "its" from an "it's" or a "there" from a "their" or a "they're," but it certainly knows how to spell "appreciated," "correct," and "embarrassing."

You should make a spelling check the last stop before considering any document finished. Even if you're a spelling bee champion, typos affect everyone who's ever used a keyboard. In order to catch these gaffes, Pages makes use of OS X's system-wide spell checker—the same one that operates in other Apple programs such as TextEdit, Stickies, Mail, iPhoto, and Keynote.

If you'd like to catch misspellings right away—and also correct them the easiest way—you'll appreciate Pages' ability to flag every misspelled word you type with a red underline. To turn this feature on, choose Edit → Spelling → Check Spelling as You Type. The next time you peek into that submenu, you see a check mark in front of that item.

Now when you glance back at your screen after pounding out a sentence, paragraph, or page, you likely see several words underlined in red—not necessarily indicating you're a bad speller, just that those words aren't in the spelling dictionary. Control-click an underlined word to see the spell checker's guesses of correct spellings at the top of the pop-up menu (Figure 2-12). Choose the correct word and Pages makes the correction in your document.

Many of the words that Pages thinks are misspelled are actually perfectly spelled words and names—they're just not in the dictionary. You can add correctly spelled words and names to the dictionary by Control-clicking the word and choosing Learn Spelling from the menu.

Figure 2-12: The easiest way to correct misspellings is to Control-click the underlined words. The top of the pop-up menu presents Pages' best guesses of the correct spelling. Choose the correct one from the list , and Pages makes the substitution in your document. If the flagged word is actually correctly spelled—an unusual name, for example—choose Learn Spelling to add that word to the dictionary. If you don't want to add the word to the dictionary, yet want to accept it as correctly spelled for this document only, choose Ignore Spelling and Pages refrains from flagging it as misspelled for the rest of the document.

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When you need to produce documents that are long, complex, and really professional-looking, Pages is ready with a host of more advanced word processing features that benefit you as you write—and your reader as she reads. Being able to work efficiently and create consistently formatted pages is useful no matter what kind of document you're creating, but it becomes essential for longer ones.

This chapter begins with Find & Replace, an editing tool that can make short work of sifting through long documents; you'll also learn how to hunt down those essential but elusive invisible characters, like spaces. The rest of the chapter deals with page layout and document formatting, and how to use text styles, layouts, and sections to produce consistently formatted pages.

Whether you're completing your 400-page novel or just polishing a three-page letter, you often have to change a word, a phrase, or even just a character that appears repeatedly throughout the manuscript. Consider these scenarios:

You named the heroine in your new novel after your wife—she was, after all, your hero. But now she's your ex and you've got 692 mentions of Suzi to change to Jessica.
You're just about to submit your term paper, Grammar and Punctuation: Its Time for a Change, when you realize you haven't quite mastered the difference between the contraction for it is and the possessive word it is.
Every time you sit at your computer, you're thankful for having a great typing teacher 25 years ago. But old habits die hard: you still find yourself typing two spaces after every sentence. Now you've got to hunt down and ferret out all those extraneous spaces.

With Pages' Find & Replace feature at your beck and call, you never need to actually look through your text to make such changes. Instead, Pages can sift through your document and make the changes you want in a split second.

Find & Replace is really two commands rolled into one: Find, and Find & Replace. Sometimes you just need to find a word or phrase in your document. For example, you may want to find the page where you use the term

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Whether you're completing your 400-page novel or just polishing a three-page letter, you often have to change a word, a phrase, or even just a character that appears repeatedly throughout the manuscript. Consider these scenarios:

You named the heroine in your new novel after your wife—she was, after all, your hero. But now she's your ex and you've got 692 mentions of Suzi to change to Jessica.
You're just about to submit your term paper, Grammar and Punctuation: Its Time for a Change, when you realize you haven't quite mastered the difference between the contraction for it is and the possessive word it is.
Every time you sit at your computer, you're thankful for having a great typing teacher 25 years ago. But old habits die hard: you still find yourself typing two spaces after every sentence. Now you've got to hunt down and ferret out all those extraneous spaces.

With Pages' Find & Replace feature at your beck and call, you never need to actually look through your text to make such changes. Instead, Pages can sift through your document and make the changes you want in a split second.

Find & Replace is really two commands rolled into one: Find, and Find & Replace. Sometimes you just need to find a word or phrase in your document. For example, you may want to find the page where you use the term Kalamazoo Gazette. Or you might want to examine every occurrence of the words "its" and "it's," so you'll have a better chance of passing that English class.

To get started, choose Edit → Find → Find Panel or press ⌘-F. The Find & Replace dialog box appears (Figure 3-1). Click Advanced to open the window to its full size. (You can sometimes use the Simple tab, but for most searches you'll appreciate the extra options available in the Advanced tab.) Enter the word you're looking for in the Find box, for example, its. Turn off the checkbox for Match case—because you want to find both capitalized and non-capitalized occurrences of this word. Turn on the checkbox for Whole words to prevent the search from turning up words that merely

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When you create a word processing document in Pages, you usually use a small assortment of formatting styles over and over again throughout the document. In a short piece, reformatting your titles or the occasional quote is no big deal; just highlight each and then use the Inspector or the Font panel to make it look the way you like.

But consider the longer document. What if your manuscript contains 49 headings, plus 194 sidebar boxes, captions, long quotations, and other heavily formatted elements? In such documents—this book, for example—manually reformatting each heading, subhead, sidebar, and caption would drive you nuts. Thankfully, Pages' Styles can alleviate the pain.

Here's the concept: you format a chunk of text exactly the way you want it—font, paragraph formatting, color, margins, and so on—and then tell Pages to memorize that collection of formatting elements as a style. A style is a prepackaged collection of formatting attributes that you can reapply with a click of the mouse.

Repeat the process for all the styles you need: headings, sidebar styles, picture captions, whatever. You end up with a collection of custom-tailored styles for each of the repeating elements in your document. Figure 3-2 gives you a taste of how helpful styles can be.

Figure 3-2: Suppose you want to write, say, a technical manual containing headings, subheads, captions, and so on. To maintain consistency in your document, use Pages' Styles to format your page elements. With just a few clicks, you can transform plain text and be certain that your headlines, captions, and the rest, maintain their uniformity throughout the document. Pages applies the font, size, style, color, margins, and so on all at once, freeing your mind to concentrate on the words themselves.

Once you've created your styles, you've done the hard part. Now, as you type along, you can choose styles as you need them. Since you're no longer formatting by hand, Pages guarantees consistent page elements throughout the document. As you go through your document during the editing process, if you happen to notice you accidentally styled, for example, a headline using the subhead style, you can fix the problem by applying the correct style with a single click.

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Everybody needs to make lists, and anyone who writes seriously—say, anything longer than a thank-you note—probably needs to make outlines. Although you may not have written an outline since you were forced to by an English teacher, give it a try. The effect it can have on your writing—and on organizing your thoughts—can be profound.

Lists and outlines are the final component of Pages' automatic formatting styles.

A list is a group of paragraphs of similar importance, usually introduced by a number, a letter, or bullet (such as this paragraph).
An outline is an ordered list that allows you to establish a hierarchy of importance for the items it contains (Figure 3-6).

You can use Pages' list styles on a list you've already created, or you can set the style and then begin typing your list. An important point to note: you've got to press Return after every list item—each item is a paragraph.

Select a list you've already typed, or place your insertion point where you want your new list to begin.
Click the List button in the toolbar and choose the list style from its pop-up menu, or choose View → Show Styles Drawer and, in the List Styles pane, click a list style. (If the List Styles pane is hidden, click the button in the lower-right corner of the Styles Drawer to make it appear.)

Most templates provide two preformatted styles you can choose for lists: Bullet, which places a small round bullet in front of each list item; and Numbered List, which places an Arabic numeral—1, 2, 3—in front of each list item.

Figure 3-6: Lists and outlines are variations on a theme—they are a framework of important points that you might flesh out or check off later. When you create a list (left), the items it contains may or may not be in any kind of order; though some points may be more important than others, in the list they all have the same relative importance. When you make an outline (right), the whole point is to organize the topics in order and by importance.

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Page-design experts who study readability cringe at a page crammed from top to bottom with typewriter-style text. Even if you've done your readers a favor by inserting white space between paragraphs, that full-width column is simply too wide for efficient reading. The problem isn't reading a long line of text—the problem arises when your eyeballs have to sweep back across the page and find the beginning of the next line. The solution lies in adjusting font size and column width. If you break up the text into narrower columns those poor eyeballs don't have to zig and zag quite so far back and forth. In other words, the wider the page, and the smaller the type, the more you need columns to reduce line length. (For exhibit A, check out any newspaper.)

Pages makes creating columns in your document effortless. Click the Columns button in the toolbar and choose two, three, or four columns from the pop-up menu. Pages instantly divides your document's text into evenly spaced columns.

But what if you don't want your entire document laid out with columns? Or perhaps you'd like more than four columns, or want your columns to be of varying widths. Pages handles such column maneuvers by subdividing your document into layouts. Layouts are invisible divisions in the document, each of which can be set up with a different column design. You create layouts by inserting a layout break at the point you'd like to change the column setup, whether it's changing the number of columns, their width, or their margins. If you don't insert any layout breaks, your whole document is one layout—in other words, the arrangement of columns is the same throughout. You can insert as many layout breaks as you need—even several to a page, spaced as closely as one line apart.

Section 3.4.1.1: Layout breaks

Create a layout break by placing the insertion point in your text at the spot you'd like to change a column setup. Choose Insert → Layout Break. Pages creates the invisible layout break at the insertion point. Move the insertion point above or below the layout break, and then click the toolbar's Columns button and choose the number of columns from the pop-up menu.

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You often see headers and footers used at the top and bottom of each page to display the title of a book, a chapter number, or a page number. You can use these repeating strips to hold anything you want: a logo or other image, a date, a legal warning or copyright notice, or even an ad (Figure 3-13).

You can see an example of a footer at the bottom of this page where, like most books, footers or headers are used as a place to display page numbers, the book title, and the chapter name. Often—as in this book—headers and footers are different on the right- and left-side pages.

Figure 3-13: Headers and footers can give your document a "framework" that's consistent from page to page. For example, a footer (A) repeated on every page of your product list can repeat ordering information and shipping restrictions, while the header (B) displays your logo and address. Choose View → Show Layout to reveal the borders of the headers and footers (C). As you enter text into a header or footer, Pages expands it—up to a maximum size of almost half a page.

You can also use headers and footers in much shorter documents to store your letterhead or return address, the date or time you created the document, the name of the computer file, and so on.

Surprising but true: you can't include a footnote in the footer. Footnotes appear above the footer, below the body text. See Section 2.1.4.3 for more footnote facts.

Pages lets you create different headers and footers in different parts of your document in order to, for example, use one header setup for your introduction and table of contents, and a different setup for the body of your document. You create this kind of design by dividing your document into sections using section breaks, a process described on Section 3.5.3.

You can add headers and footers to any Pages document. Choose View → Show Layout, and Pages displays the header and footer outlines. Click inside the outline, and then enter and format text just as you would in the body of the document, using all the character and paragraph formatting tools, including styles, background colors, and so on.

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If you plan ahead as you format your document, Pages can automatically generate a table of contents for you with one click of the mouse. The secret is to format all your headings and subheadings using styles. With those styles to guide the way, Pages rockets through the document, notes those headings and their page numbers, and assembles them all into a tidy list.

Open the Document Inspector and click the TOC tab.

Pages displays a list of every paragraph style used in the document (Figure 3-17).
Turn on the checkbox to the left of each style you want to include in the table of contents.

For example, you might want to include level 1 headings, and level 2 and 3 subheadings, but exclude level 4 subheadings. If you also want the page numbers listed in the table of contents for that style of heading, turn on the checkbox to the right in the "#'s" column. You may want to include page numbers for level 1 headings and level 2 subheadings, but not level 3, for example.
Place the insertion point at the beginning of the line where you want Pages to insert the table of contents. You may want to add a page break to the beginning of your document so that the table of contents starts on a blank page. Choose Insert → Table of Contents.
Pages inserts the table of contents using its standard table of contents style.

You can't put a table of contents at the end of the document. A table of contents lists only those selected paragraph styles that follow it—until it runs into another table of contents. This way, you can have several tables of contents, each pertaining to the section of the document that follows. The only way to create a table of contents that covers the entire document is to have only one, and place it at the beginning.

The only way you can change the appearance of a table of contents is to modify its special text styles. The table of contents is actually a special breed of formatted text field, and so defies your attempts to edit any of its text. In other words, you can't add or remove words or format the text in the table contents directly by, for example, selecting a word and changing its font size. You can only modify the table of contents' appearance with styles:

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The preceding chapters treated Pages like it was just a hot new word processing program, which, of course, it is. But now it's time for Pages to step into the spotlight and reveal its other, flashier persona. Its page-layout abilities set Pages apart from other word processors; what's causing the program's well-deserved buzz is the incredible ease with which you can produce professional-looking layouts.

Apple's software designers realized that the plain text document age is waning. Photographs, artwork, movies, and music are just a click away on your computer. Nearly everyone has a color printer. Digital media convergence is a reality and the kinds of documents people want to create now are stylishly laid out, colorful, and filled with photos (Figure 4-1).

Pages can access the pictures, songs, and movies that you already have on your computer—probably in iPhoto, iTunes, and iMovie—and give you the freedom to include these elements within a Pages document. As for the "stylishly laid out" part, Pages provides a graphic arts department in the form of its collection of templates—tastefully designed starting points for your next brochure, newsletter, or 'zine.

For writers and page designers, nothing is at once so exciting and so frightening as the blank page. Thanks to Pages' templates, fear of the blank page is a thing of the past. Though you can start with a blank canvas when the creative juices are raging, don't be shy about reaching for one of the templates to give you a jump-start.

The next few pages present a Reader's Digest version of creating a document, using one of the templates. The rest of this chapter flushes out the topic in depth, and Chapter 7 covers modifying templates or creating your own from scratch.

Figure 4-1: With the Non-Profit Newsletter as the starting point, this document features in-line and fixed objects, masked and rotated pictures, text boxes, a background image, and master objects—along with the standard word processing elements like headlines, columns, and a footer. This chapter shows how to create these and many other effects as you progress from simple word processing to sophisticated page layout.

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For writers and page designers, nothing is at once so exciting and so frightening as the blank page. Thanks to Pages' templates, fear of the blank page is a thing of the past. Though you can start with a blank canvas when the creative juices are raging, don't be shy about reaching for one of the templates to give you a jump-start.

The next few pages present a Reader's Digest version of creating a document, using one of the templates. The rest of this chapter flushes out the topic in depth, and Chapter 7 covers modifying templates or creating your own from scratch.

Figure 4-1: With the Non-Profit Newsletter as the starting point, this document features in-line and fixed objects, masked and rotated pictures, text boxes, a background image, and master objects—along with the standard word processing elements like headlines, columns, and a footer. This chapter shows how to create these and many other effects as you progress from simple word processing to sophisticated page layout.

Launch Pages—or if it's already running, choose File → New.

The Template Chooser appears, home of the 40 predesigned templates courtesy of Apple—and soon to be the filing cabinet for your own document templates.

If you see a document page at this point instead of the Template Chooser, choose Pages → Preferences, and then turn on the button for "Show Template Chooser dialog." Close the preferences window, close the document window, and then choose File → New again. This time the Template Chooser should appear.
Choose the Family Newsletter by double-clicking its image (or by clicking once to select it, and then clicking Choose).

The Template Chooser retracts and the newsletter document appears in its place (Figure 4-2).

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In order to perform its page layout wizardry, Pages views the various elements you can incorporate into your text—pictures, movies, text boxes, shapes, tables, and charts—as objects. Pages approaches objects in two ways:

In-line objects behave like a text character in a line of text. If you add more text to your document in front of this kind of object, it gets pushed along with the text, always remaining tied to the words next to it. You'll find in-line objects a good choice for text boxes containing a short quote that needs to stay connected to the surrounding text, for example (see Figure 4-6).
Fixed objects are standalone entities. Instead of being tied to the document's text, they're bolted into the page at a specific spot. Most people prefer fixed objects when they're adding pictures or charts to a page layout. Adding text to the page doesn't affect the objects' placement, and you can drag and resize these kinds of objects to precisely position them on the page (Figure 4-7).

Figure 4-5: The Media Browser is the back door to your iPhoto, iTunes, and movie collections. Drag an image from the Media Browser and drop the shadowy thumbnail into any of the template's picture placeholders. Pages resizes your picture and replaces the placeholder picture. If you decide that's not the right picture, drag another one in on top of it to replace your first choice.

When you insert a fixed object on a text-filled page you can determine whether the text flows under the object, over the object, or wraps around it—flowing around the object so the text neither overlaps the picture nor is hidden by it (see Section 4.3.7).

Since fixed objects are separate items, you can stack them in layers—just like you could arrange paper snapshots on a scrapbook page. One picture is on top, overlapping portions of other pictures beneath. Besides shifting the position of each object, you can also shift its layer—moving it in front of or behind other objects that it overlaps.

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When you're working with pictures, text boxes, shapes, tables, and so on, Pages sees them all as objects and handles them in similar ways. Once you master resizing, rotating, and text wrapping around, say, a picture, you're ready to handle the same operations on shapes, tables, text boxes, and other objects.

Select an object by clicking it. Its selection handles appear, in effect saying, "I'm ready and waiting—mold me to your whim!" The selection handles also tell you whether the object is fixed (eight open black squares), in-line (three open black squares), a group (eight solid gray squares), locked on the page (eight X marks), or a master object (eight solid blue squares). The most basic object maneuvers are moving and resizing.

As long as an object isn't locked (see Section 4.3.9.3), you can move it by clicking inside it and dragging. You can drag fixed objects anywhere on the page or to another page in your document. When you drag in-line objects, you can only drop them into a line of text. Watch the insertion point at the tip of your arrow cursor as you drag; drop the object when your insertion point reaches the spot in the text where you want to move your object.

If you have to move an object very far—to another page or to the other end of your document—select the object and choose Edit → Cut. Scroll to the point in your document where you want to insert the object, and then do one of two things: to insert it as an in-line object, place the insertion point within the text and choose Edit → Paste. To insert it as a fixed object, click the margin of the document so that the insertion point disappears, choose Edit → Paste, and then drag the object into its final position.

When you place your arrow pointer over one of an object's open black selection handles, the cursor changes into a double-headed arrow, which means you can resize the object by dragging that handle. If the object in question is a picture or a movie, Pages locks its proportions to prevent you from stretching or squashing it while you resize. You're free to alter the proportions of other objects—like shapes and tables—while you drag their selection handles. To force Pages to preserve their proportions, hold down the Shift key while you resize.

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Besides arranging objects' size and placement on the page, you can also adjust the way each object looks by adjusting its various properties. Object properties include things like fill color, line color and style, drop shadows, and object opacity. The Graphic Inspector and the Color Picker are your command center for making these adjustments.

You can add or change the color of shapes, backgrounds, shadows, table cells, and chart elements. You can fill these objects with solid colors, gradients—in which two colors blend gradually into each other—or images.

Any time you need to adjust the color of shapes, text, backgrounds, lines, or shadows, select the object and click one of the Inspectors' color wells to call the Color Picker to the fore. (Alternatively, you can click the toolbar's Colors button, or choose View → Show Colors.)

The Color Picker is a part of OS X, and comes into play in many different programs when you need to adjust colors. The Color Picker provides five different approaches to choosing colors through the buttons at the top of its window (Figure 4-24). But whether you choose the color wheel or the crayons for picking colors, the options in the rest of the window stay the same. Select a color using any of the five Color Picker displays and see the color in the swatch box.

Slide the Opacity slider to the left to make the color more transparent (or enter an opacity percentage directly in the % box). As you adjust opacity, the color swatch takes on a diagonally split-screen appearance, with the reduced opacity color displayed on the bottom of the swatch. The upper part of the swatch box displays shades of gray—actually the mask that Pages applies to the selected color to reduce its opacity (or increase its transparency). In other words, if you set the opacity to zero, the upper part of the swatch shows pure black, masking out all the color and resulting in no color. Increase the opacity, and that black turns into lighter and lighter gray, letting more of the color show through, resulting in more opaque colors—until you reach 100 percent opacity, or pure color.

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If your documents are destined to be viewed onscreen, you can make them easier to navigate by adding hyperlinks, which let you turn any word or phrase into hypertext—an automated link. Click that link to do one of three things:

Click a Bookmark hyperlink to move to another part of the current document. Whether on the same page or at the far end of a 200-page novel, Pages jumps to that location, flashing the insertion point or highlighting your chosen destination. Bookmarks are great for cross-references. You could write, for example, "As you drive south, be on the lookout for the first boojum trees and cardon cactus." Clicking those names could take you to detailed descriptions of the plants.

You can also use Bookmarks for a table of contents, where a click of a topic takes you to that part of the document.
Click a Web page hyperlink, and Pages calls up your Web browser, opening the desired page. You can use Web links to open your company's Web page, or check on the skiing conditions at Bear Valley, for example.
When you click an Email Message hyperlink, Pages summons your email program and opens a preaddressed email message. This ability is handy for communications like product orders, requests for more information, or letters to your elected officials.

The Link Inspector (Figure 4-32) is the control center for hyperlinks.

Adding bookmarks is a two-step process: first create the bookmark, and then create the hyperlink that jumps to that bookmark (Figure 4-32).

Place the insertion point or select some text in your document that you wish to bookmark. You can only bookmark text—not an object, a text box, or text inside a text box.
Choose Insert → Bookmark (or open the Link Inspector, click the Bookmark tab, and click the Add (+) button). Pages adds the bookmark to the Link Inspector.

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Pages provides two special kinds of objects to add visual pizzazz to your documents and help you clearly communicate complex information: tables and charts. This chapter guides you through table and chart creation and formatting—starting with tables.

A table, also known as a matrix, is a rectangle containing rows and columns of cells. Each cell can contain a chunk of text or numbers. Pages can dress up tables or individual cells with borders and color or image fills for backgrounds. You can create very simple plain-text tables—as you might using just the tab key in a word processor—or an elaborate construction filled with color and pictures that at first glance looks nothing like a table. Figure 5-1 shows a few examples.

Tables are a great way to clearly display a large amount of data, create forms, or quickly format a page full of pictures.

You can add tables to a Pages document either as fixed or in-line objects, with one important distinction: fixed tables are limited to one page, while in-line tables can span several pages. (Pop back to Section 4.2 for a recap of the difference between fixed and inline objects.)

How many cells can you put in a table? Though you'd be hard pressed to think up a need for such a table, as far as Pages is concerned, a table can be as small as one cell: one column wide by one row high. At the other extreme, Pages can make tables up to 20 columns wide. A fixed table can fill an entire page with as many rows as you can squeeze in, while an in-line table can stretch over many pages, or columns linked text boxes, with an essentially unlimited number of rows—for a catalog product list, for example. Massive tables, however, can slow down Pages as it constantly updates hundreds of cells. If you need a table that's more than a few pages long, consider breaking it up into two or more tables, each a few pages long.

Figure 5-1: You can make tables that are" just columns of facts and" figures, but with Pages' table-making" abilities—combined" with your imagination—it's" easy to create forms, catalogs," photo layouts, and oodles" more. The Photo Journal, Lab" Notes, School Report, and" Datasheet templates (page" 85) all include tables and are" good places to start exploring" table creation.

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You can add tables to a Pages document either as fixed or in-line objects, with one important distinction: fixed tables are limited to one page, while in-line tables can span several pages. (Pop back to Section 4.2 for a recap of the difference between fixed and inline objects.)

How many cells can you put in a table? Though you'd be hard pressed to think up a need for such a table, as far as Pages is concerned, a table can be as small as one cell: one column wide by one row high. At the other extreme, Pages can make tables up to 20 columns wide. A fixed table can fill an entire page with as many rows as you can squeeze in, while an in-line table can stretch over many pages, or columns linked text boxes, with an essentially unlimited number of rows—for a catalog product list, for example. Massive tables, however, can slow down Pages as it constantly updates hundreds of cells. If you need a table that's more than a few pages long, consider breaking it up into two or more tables, each a few pages long.

Figure 5-1: You can make tables that are" just columns of facts and" figures, but with Pages' table-making" abilities—combined" with your imagination—it's" easy to create forms, catalogs," photo layouts, and oodles" more. The Photo Journal, Lab" Notes, School Report, and" Datasheet templates (page" 85) all include tables and are" good places to start exploring" table creation.

You determine whether a table's fixed or in-line when you add it to a Pages document, just like with other objects. To add an in-line table, place the insertion point in the text where you want the table to appear, click the Objects button in the toolbar, and choose Table from its pop-up menu (or choose Insert → Table). You can insert a table in any text column or text box.

Pages starts you off with a table of three columns and four rows, which fills the text column from left to right, and Pages opens the Table Inspector so you can tailor the number of rows and columns, or adjust the Column Width and Row Height to suit your needs.

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Tables offer a way of displaying a large amount of information in a very readable format. Charts, also known as graphs, let you depict large amounts of data that would otherwise be tedious to read about in straight prose: "In 1998, sales of wombat gloves were $807 a year; in 1999 they rose to $874, before dipping to $751 in 2000."

Charts are graphical representations of lots of little bits of data—data that must first be organized in a spreadsheet. Once those numbers are in place, the stage is set for a modern miracle: from the stultifying columns of numbers, Pages helps you create a gorgeous chart, dramatically revealing the hidden pattern behind the numbers. True, not all charts are gorgeous, but they all reveal patterns and trends in the data that can be impossible to see in other ways.

Pages doesn't contain a spreadsheet program—but it does contain the Chart Data Editor, a pseudo-spreadsheet for your data. It's really just a table for numbers; it lacks the ability to perform any kind of mathematical functions. If you're making a simple chart with a small amount of data, this approach works fine. However, if you're working with large amounts of data, you undoubtedly already have them stored in a spreadsheet—probably Excel or AppleWorks. The Chart Data Editor acts as a conduit between your spreadsheet program and Pages. If you've prepared a spreadsheet properly in Excel or AppleWorks, you can quickly and easily import the data into Pages and create a chart.

Pages provides eight basic chart types from which you can create a multitude of different looks. The key to creating great charts is picking the right type for the kind of information you're presenting. Good charts can tell a complicated story at a glance—and poorly designed charts can confuse and mislead. (Perhaps you want to intentionally mislead—that takes a carefully designed chart, as well!)

Most charts share some basic features that they use to display your data:

Axes. The x-axis and the y-axis are the horizontal and vertical rulers that provide some kind of scale against which to plot or measure your data. One axis corresponds to either your spreadsheet's row or column headings—in Figure 5-6's example, the column headings for years are charted along the x-axis. The other axis is the value scale determined by the data

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After you create a Pages document and carefully lay out, tweak, and polish it to perfection, your work is complete—if you want to view it only onscreen, that is. It's likely, however, that you'll often want to print a hard copy, or share it with others via CD, email, fax, or the Web. This chapter explores the next step in the life of a Pages document: delivering it from your computer into the hands and in front of the eyeballs of your intended audience. You'll also learn how to import files into Pages from other programs like Microsoft Word and AppleWorks.

Table of Contents

Section 3.4.1.1: Layout breaks