iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Chapter 7. Objects Up Close: Adding, Modifying, and More

Pages, Keynote, and Numbers all let you plow a wide range of design elements into your documents—text boxes, pictures, movies, sounds, shapes, tables, and charts. As varied as these visual components might seem, they’re much more alike than different. In iWork, all these elements are called objects, and you move, layer, and adjust them using the same basic techniques. It’s like a pageant: Although each of these beauties has its own distinct talent, they all follow the same rules.

This chapter introduces you to most of iWork’s objects (you’ll get to know more about tables and charts in the next chapter) and then shows you all the graphical magic that you can unlock in all of them. From workaday actions like selecting and moving objects to spinning them in place or adding shadows, reflections, and borders, this chapter gives you the know-how to build sophisticated layouts with ease.

And here’s the best part: Once you get the hang of working with objects in any single iWork program, you’ve got it down in the others, too. Designing a presentation slideshow in Keynote, for example, is very much like designing a page-layout document in Pages. You use the same tools in both programs to arrange your images, text, charts, and so on. This chapter introduces you to all of them, using the design of Up & Away’s hidden fortress catalog as a working example.