iWork: The Missing Manual

Chapter 7. Objects Up Close: Adding, Modifying, and More

Pages, Keynote, and Numbers all give you a wide range of design elements to choose from: text boxes, pictures, movies, sounds, shapes, tables, and charts. As varied as these visual components might seem, they’re much more alike than you might think. In iWork, all these elements are called objects, and you move, layer, and adjust them using exactly the same techniques. It’s like one of those cheesy televised talent contests: Although each contestant has her own distinct talent, they all follow the same rules.

Throughout this chapter, you’ll meet most of iWork’s objects (you’ll get to know more about tables and charts in the next chapter), and then see how to make your objects more stylish using things like borders and shadow effects. From workaday actions like selecting and moving objects to spinning them 360 degrees or adding shadows, reflections, and borders, this chapter gives you the know-how to build sophisticated layouts with ease.

And here’s the best part: Once you get the hang of working with objects in one iWork program, you’ve got it down in the others, too. Designing a presentation slideshow in Keynote, for example, is very much like designing a leaflet in Pages. You use the same tools in both programs to arrange your images, text, charts, and so on. This chapter introduces you to all of these object-editing tools using Crazyland Wonderpark’s Experiences catalog as an example.

Floating vs. Inline Objects

Objects are ...