iWork® '09 Portable Genius

Chapter 2. How Can I Work Faster in Pages?

Pages makes it easy for you to create powerful and persuasive documents. To create those documents quickly and efficiently, you need to understand Pages' components and what they do, set preferences to suit the way you work, and customize the Pages window to show the tools you need. This chapter also covers what you need to know about controlling page layout, adding text and new template pages to a document, and bringing Microsoft Word documents into Pages.

Knowing What You Are Working With

Setting Pages-Specific Preferences

Customizing the Pages Window for Faster Work

Controlling the Page Layout

Adding Text to a Document

Adding New Template Pages to a Document

Working with Microsoft Word Documents

Knowing What You Are Working With

When you open Pages and choose the document type in the Template Chooser window (if it appears), you should see something like figure 2.1.

Figure 2.1. The Pages window with a word-processing document open.

Here's the lowdown on what these elements do:

• Document type. Shows whether the document is a word-processing document or a page-layout document. More on this in a moment.

• Toolbar. Provides buttons and pop-up menus for common actions and for displaying other tools (such as the Inspector window). You can customize the toolbar ...