iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Working with Lists

Our brains love a good list. We itemize, we rank, we categorize, we outline, we catalog (and apparently, some of us even list the ways we list). Different types of lists typically require different types of attention—you dash off shopping lists quickly, work through recipe instructions step by step, and painstakingly revise and reorder the outline for a research paper. Pages provides simple but flexible tools for managing all these types of lists, from quick and casual bullet lists to baroque nested lists, dense with topics and indented sub-sub-subtopics.

If Pages sees you making a list, it slips quietly into a special mode tuned for managing your list items. Pages calls this automatic list detection, which is fancy talk for, “I saw you start a paragraph with a number or a hyphen—I bet you’re making a list.” Pages recognizes that most of us make lists in the same way: one item per line, usually preceded with a number, an asterisk, or a hyphen (Figure 2-16). Specifically, Pages bumps you automatically into list mode when you do either of the following:

• Start a paragraph with a hyphen (–), asterisk (*), or bullet (•, Option-8), followed by a space, some text, and then the Return key.

  

  Figure 2-16. Pages quietly shifts into list mode when it sees you starting a list. Left: When your first list item starts with a hyphen, asterisk, or bullet, Pages starts a bulleted list. ...