iWork: The Missing Manual

Chapter 10. Creating Templates to Streamline Projects

You’ve undoubtedly used—and come to appreciate—Pages’ timesaving templates. They range from the simple, like Classic Letter, to the complex, like multipage newsletter layouts. But whether plain or intricate, they all share the same purpose: to get you started on a document quickly, with a large part of the formatting already in place so you can concentrate on the content instead of the layout. This chapter shows you how to make your own templates so you can add them to Pages’ Template Chooser, the design roster you learned about way back on Getting Started with Pages.

Template-Building Basics

Don’t let templates fool you—they’re really just plain old Pages documents. In fact, every custom template you create begins its life as a regular Pages file with text, pictures, tables, and anything else you want. After you get the file just the way you want it, choose File→“Save as Template,” confirm that you want to “Add to Template Chooser,” give the template a name, and then save the name either by clicking outside of the title-editing box or by pressing Return. From now on, when you open the Template Chooser, this template appears in the My Templates category (Figure 10-1).

When you create a new document based on this template (Getting Started with Pages), the fresh, untitled document looks exactly how your template document looked when you saved it; complete with text, pictures, and so on.

Figure 10-1. Pages stows your custom templates ...