iWork® '09 For Dummies®

Chapter 9. Fine-Tuning Your Pages Documents

In This Chapter

• Formatting text from the format bar

• Managing styles

• Searching for text

• Navigating with thumbnails

This chapter explores some of the Pages tools that improve your productivity and make your documents look better. You might think of some of these tools as advanced features in the sense that you can manage to produce fine Pages documents without using them. But if you think advanced means complicated, you're wrong. They can save you time — sometimes a lot of it — and make your documents easier to read and much, much easier to reuse.

Using the Format Bar

One of the features of iWork that makes it so easy to use is that there are usually many ways to accomplish something. If you want to change a font, for example, you can use the Fonts window, a style (discussed later in this chapter), the format bar, or Text inspector. The format bar brings together formatting controls from many places in iWork; it resembles toolbars in other programs such as Microsoft Word.

You decide whether or not you want to display the format bar. When shown, it appears across the top of the window below the toolbar. Figure 9-1 shows the format bar with the toolbar hidden (so that you can concentrate on the format bar). As you can see, the format bar is only one row of controls, buttons, and icons. That is part of a compromise: Tools such as inspectors and the Fonts window have more space to allow you more control over formatting features, but the format bar brings ...