iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Working with Objects

Good news! If you’ve made your way through the Pages or Keynote section of this book, you already know how to design your spreadsheet. Working with the sheet canvas in Numbers is nearly identical to designing a Keynote slide or building a page layout in Pages. Like both of those programs, Numbers clears a workspace for you and lets you arrange objects in that space to build a designed document. You even work with the exact same set of tools and building materials, since all iWork programs share a common arsenal of objects: pictures, text boxes, shapes, tables, charts, movies, and sounds.

By now, you probably know the drill: Click an object to select it; drag it to a new location on the page; resize it by dragging one of the selection handles along its border; and use the Format Bar or Graphic Inspector to add effects, stroke borderlines, picture frames, and color fills.

Like Keynote, there’s no such thing as inline objects in Numbers, as there is in Pages. Instead all Numbers objects are floating objects, which you place on the sheet canvas independently of the rest. That means that you can’t add an image or shape inside a text box, for example, as you might in Pages. (You can, however, add images as backgrounds to table cells and other objects, as you’ll learn on Adding Pictures to Table Cells.)

Because the details of adding and editing all of these objects has been covered elsewhere in the book, this chapter covers the mechanics of each feature only briefly, ...