Give your Pages documents some professional polish with styles

When you write a document in Pages, do you tend to use formatting like bold, italics and font size to denote specific sections? If so, you’re not making the most of this excellent word processing package.

Rather than simply increase the font size and make the text bold each time you create a heading, why not make use of styles in Pages? This handy little drawer, which slides out from the side of the interface, is the easiest way to not only apply styles to your projects, but also keep them uniform. This ensures that all of your headings and titles look the same throughout your text, thereby avoiding distracting switches in the aesthetic of your work.

BEFORE: Use Pages as a straightforward text editor and you’re missing out.

AFTER: Take control of styles and your work will scream of professionalism.

Every document in Pages has a set of defined styles, from the basics in a blank document, through to more detailed styles found within the beautiful Pages templates, available from the Template Chooser.

For the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll be assuming that you have no formatting applied to your document or that you are starting a document from scratch. In our example we’ll be using a report document that uses standard body text with headings and titles in a bold typeface. By using the Styles Drawer we’ll then apply new styles and show you how you can quickly adjust them and create new styles if need be.

Once you’ve mastered these techniques, you’ll be able to turn any boring text document into a professional piece of work. It will also be adjustable at any time to suit your needs, simply by heading back to the Styles Drawer and making changes. Using styles can help you enhance almost any text document, from a school report to a business proposal, to produce a polished final product. Let’s take a look at how to achieve this in eight simple steps.

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How to Make Your Pages Documents Professional with Styles

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  New Document

  Start by launching Pages and selecting the blank word processing template from the Template Chooser to start a new word processing project. Alternatively, you can load any text document you may have already created, as we have with our report document.

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  The Styles Drawer

  To show the Styles Drawer, click on the circular, blue button at the top-left of the interface just below the View and Outline buttons. All the styles in your current document will now be listed in the Styles Drawer, which will slide out to the side of the interface.

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  Changing Style

  Highlight the title text of the document and click on the Title style from the Styles Drawer. The title you selected will now have the Title style applied to it. Don’t worry about the way it looks, we’ll show you how to adjust the default styles over the next few steps.

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  Add Headings

  Now select the first heading in your document and click on the Heading 1 style in the Styles Drawer. The heading text will now have the heading style applied to it. Do the same for any other headings in your document until all heading text uses this style.

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  Multiple Selection

  To quickly select all instances of a style in your document, click on it in the Styles Drawer then click the downward-pointing arrow next to it. Click the Select All Uses of… option from the drop-down menu that appears. Here we’ve selected all uses of Heading 1.

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  Customizing Styles

  With all instances of a particular style selected, you can change the look by adjusting the font type and size from the Format bar. Changes will be applied to all instances of this style and the arrow next to the style name in the Styles Drawer will turn red.

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  Saving Styles

  Click on the downward-pointing arrow next to your style that turned red. From the drop-down menu that appears, select Redefine Style from Selection to make this the default format for that style. You can continue to make changes to any other styles you are using.

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  Create New Styles

  To create a new style, add text to your document and apply the font type and size as well as any other settings. Click the downward-pointing arrow next to the highlighted style in the Styles Drawer and click Create New Paragraph Style from Selection to name it.

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  Quick Tip

  To quickly apply styles to text, you can set keyboard shortcuts for individual styles. Click on the downward-pointing arrow next to any style in the Styles Drawer, and hover the cursor over the Hot Key option on the drop-down menu.

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