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.
