Are you in love with your word processor? I fall in love with the applications I use. I’m the guy that goes into his browser, and changes all of the preferences. Well, I have been doing a lot of writing lately, so I have become infatuated with Pages. When I first launched Pages, I thought it looked surprisingly bare-bones. That, my friends, is called judging a book by it’s cover. There are quite a few controls hiding just under the surface of Pages.
I have taken a screen capture of my setup of Pages, and color coded it so that I can illustrate some of the useful features that aren’t necessarily glaringly obvious. Onward!
Pages
Blue
Here is the format bar. I think just about every GUI word processor known to man has one of these babies. It has your standard controls like font selector, alignment control, and column selection. It takes up very little space, so it’s a no brainer to keep this enabled.
Purple
Here is the page thumbnail display. This is incredibly useful for jumping between pages. If you quickly need to find that page with your blue graph, this instantly becomes your best friend.
Yellow
Here is the comment display. I was once a skeptic when it came to comments, but I have come to use them on everything I write. When I bust out an obscure reference to Greek Mythology, I throw in a link to the corresponding Wikipedia article for future reference. For me, it might as well be called the “Wikipedia display.”
Red
Here is the styles drawer. It offers up pretty much every bit of text styling that you’ll need. Make your text bulleted, underscored, or bold with one click.
Green
Here is the inspector. This is a floating window that I keep on all of the time; no matter what. This is where almost all of Pages’ magic happens. If it happens in Pages, it is probably controlled in the inspector.
Orange aka “Urnge”
Here is the media browser. If you want to add audio, images, or movies to your document, you can access it in this window. iTunes, iPhoto, and iMovie are all represented in this area. It is usually faster to grab your media here rather than going to each of the applications, finding what you want, and then dragging it to Pages.
You can show or hide any of these displays in the View menu of Pages. I hope that this helps you get more acquainted with this fantastic word processor.
January 4th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Yeah, my first look at pages was just like “oh crap, this is what I get?”. I’ve been using it to write papers nonetheless because it does the drink, still working on the ‘06 version, but am buying the ‘08 and hope that your praise for the new pages is warranted. Peace
January 5th, 2008 at 9:33 am
Sam, I have to agree 100%. I was a bit skeptical about it, and I’ve had a hard time moving away from the Office package. But, in my obvious hatred for all things Microsoft these day, I’ve been using the iWork bundle more and more. I really need to pick up 08!
January 6th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
I have been using and loving the whole iWork suite (much to the disdain of my IT dept. – anti-mac nazi’s).
Great review.
I just stumbled on your blog by way of your flickr group. Must say I need to bookmark it!
Take care,
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January 6th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Jeremy, I have to say… i have a little philosophy about I.T. Dept.’s. They know full well that if they made the switch to macs, that they’d have 1/3 of the work, and as such, would have 1/3 of the salary… ;)
Anyway, thanks a ton for the kind works about the blog, it really helps to keep us motivated. It’s nice to hear people’s opinions about the work we’re doing :)