iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Undoing and Backing Up

All iWork programs offer a few special tools to save you from yourself—or from your cat walking across the keyboard just after you perform a Select All command.

When you have one of those “Oh no!” moments, always reach first for the Edit → Undo command (or press ⌘-Z), and Pages reverses your last action. Whether you just changed a word, deleted a page, or applied a new font color, ⌘-Z lets you take it back. (If you learn only one keyboard shortcut, you owe it to yourself to master ⌘-Z. You’ll come back to this one over and over again.)

Note

The wording of the Edit → Undo command changes to reflect the kind of action that it’s prepared to undo. For example, if you just dragged a paragraph into the wrong spot, the Edit menu says Undo Drop. You also see other possibilities like Undo Format, Undo Typing, Undo Cut, and so on.

The iWork programs all give you unlimited multiple Undos, which means that as you repeatedly press ⌘-Z, you throw the time machine into reverse and watch as it peels away the changes you’ve made to your document, one after another. Even if you’ve saved the document—which you should do frequently as you work, of course—you can still undo changes made before the save. But the time machine grinds to a halt when you close a document. Pages flushes all your changes out of its memory. The next time you open that document you have to start moving forward again—there’s nothing to undo.

After you perform an Undo (and breathe a sigh of relief), the Edit ...