iWork: The Missing Manual

Chapter 8. Building Tables and Charts

Numbers often spell out an idea even better than words can. When you’re writing an annual report, for example, or charting the monthly ebb of visitors to your amusement park, the actual figures add up to much more than a lengthy written description. Pages might be a word processor, but it does a fine job at slinging numbers, too, giving you the tools to present data and other complex information clearly and efficiently.

Numbers? As you know, this also happens to be the name of a certain spreadsheet program included in iWork. In fact, the way that Pages uses tables and charts to manage your data reveals a strong family resemblance to its math-minded cousin. As you’ll learn when you dig into Numbers later in this book, tables are central to Numbers documents, where every table acts as its own standalone spreadsheet. In Pages (and Keynote, too), tables are lightweight versions of the full-featured tables in Numbers; the same goes for charts.

Like the images, shapes, and text boxes explored in Chapter 7, tables and charts are objects, so you can move, resize, and manipulate them like you can any other object. You’ll learn all the advanced details of building tables and charts in the Numbers section of this book, but this chapter gets you started on the fundamentals as it takes you through Pages’ table and chart features.

Creating Tables

Tables are efficient containers for displaying large amounts of data or creating forms. A table is a grid of information ...