iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Using Templates for Ready-to-Go Documents

Don’t let all this talk about document design make you nervous. If you were out shopping for plaid pants the day they handed out aesthetic sensibility, it’s OK. The style sense of Apple’s professional designers is now ready to help. They’ve stocked the pantry to overflowing with a delicious array of over 180 templates, preformatted documents that can give you a tastefully elegant design right from the get-go.

As soon as you launch Pages, the program greets you with the Template Chooser (Figure 1-2), a document smorgasbord with a left-hand menu divided neatly into categories for both word-processing and page-layout documents. Here you can choose to start your creation from scratch with a blank page (choose a template from one of the Blank categories) or use one of the starter documents (choose any of the other templates).

To help you make your choice, the Template Chooser shows miniature previews, or thumbnails, of the design for each document template. Many of these templates, especially in the Page Layout category, contain several page design options, and you can quickly leaf through all of them by “skimming” your mouse pointer across the face of the template thumbnail. (Don’t click the thumbnail; just point to it.) As you move your cursor, Pages flips through the template’s layouts. Need a closer look before you can commit? Nudge the slider at the bottom of the Template Chooser to the right to make the thumbnails larger; move it to the left ...