Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
Today let's look at using Shapes in Pages.
At their most basic Shapes are pretty simple.
I'm going to create a simple shape here in a blank Pages document and I can choose from
any number of preset shapes.
I'm going to do a circle and it creates this default circle with a fill and a shadow and
everything like that.
I can make adjustments on the right under Style.
I can remove the fill.
I can add a border.
I can change the drop shadow.
There are a lot of different settings I can do.
You probably know about those.
But what you may not know is that you can put things inside of shapes.
Like, for instance, I going to paste some text in here.
You can see that not only does the text go inside the shape but it also wraps to the
shape itself.
That will work even if I scale it.
So I'm going to select it and then make it larger.
You can see that the text will fit inside the shape no matter what size I use.
Text also wraps around shapes.
So I'm going to select in the body here and I'm going to paste.
The shape now gets pushed to the bottom.
But I can move the shape up and you can see here that the text wraps around it.
I can change that wrapping under Arrange and change it to specifically go around the shape.
I can even adjust the spacing around the shape, the exact type of fit.
I can make it square or round even though it is a round.
So there are a lot of different things I can do there with Shapes to make them really interesting
and useful.
But text isn't the only thing I can put into a shape.
I can also drag and drop images into a shape.
You can see once I do that I have several different ways of adjusting the image inside.
Scaling it and when I hit Done only the image that is left and kind of cutout by the shape.
I can again go to the wrapping here and wrap things around the shape.
So it works really well.
In fact this type of thing works even better if you set the columns for the body of text
to two columns.
You can see it wraps around and kind of makes more sense when you have two columns instead
of one with a shape in the middle.
Now if you don't want to use one of the standard shapes you could always draw with a pen.
This will allow you to create a shape of any specific size, like that.
You see the text wraps around that shape as well.
You can even curve the shape.
Just because you have a shape it doesn't mean it has to be visible.
So I've got the border here but I can make it so that the border is gone and also there
is no fill so kind of the shape is an invisible hole there and perhaps I can put another element
in there or just use it as negative space.
You can combine shapes to do some creative things.
For instance, I'm going to create a Venn diagram.
I'm going to do that by creating multiple circles.
I'm going to Option Drag to duplicate the circle here and I'm going to select them both.
You can select them both by holding the Shift key when you Select.
I can adjust properties of them together so I don't have to do each one individually.
Now I've got the basis of a Venn diagram.
I want text to wrap around this but it is going to be awkward with these two circles
so instead what I'm going to do is I'm going to select these and I'm going to arrange the
text wrapping to be None.
Then I'm going to create another circle, kind of have this behind the other two.
First I'll make it the right size and then I will go and under Arrange I can send this
to the back.
So you can see now how this is behind the other two.
Let's create the Style.
Let's create a white fill and no drop shadow here.
Furthermore let's create some text fields which are kind of like shapes with nothing
on them to begin with.
I'm going to create it like that and I'm going to set it so that the text is centered inside.
Also I'm going to Option Drag these here so I've got the elements of a Venn diagram all
laid out really nicely.
I'm going to have to work to set the arrangement for everything.
So let's first select these text boxes here.
Set Arrangement so there is no text wrapping.
So they are not going to interfere with each other or anything else on the page.
Then I'm going to select the two circles here and also make sure that Text Wrapping is set
to None.
Then on top of that I'll make sure that this one is set to Around.
This is the background one that we made.
So the only one that has a wrapping is that one back there.
Now I'm going to select them all; use Command A very quickly here since it is very hard
to select those thin lines and I'm going to group them together.
Once they are grouped together they move as a single element and even scale as a single
element.
I'm going to paste some text in here and you can see now that it wraps around this Venn
diagram and I can reposition it as I want.
If I double click in it you can see I can still edit the individual elements inside
the diagram.
So I can now change the text in them.
Even play around with the colors and the borders and things like that very easily.
Note also that some shapes have special properties.
Like, for instance, if I use one of the talk bubbles you can see that I've got these little
green dots here.
I can, of course, use the regular dots to stretch it like I want.
But the green dots will allow me to do things like change the specific shape, like that.
Even the curve here.
So there is a lot of different things that you can do by using these.
Even drag this around to be at any point coming out of this.
Then, of course, customizing the style is key for any of this stuff.
Then having the text wrapping set so that it wraps around this or doesn't wrap around
it depending upon what you want.
So, shapes are available not only in Pages but in Numbers and Keynote as well.
So it is very useful to know how to use them well.
What I encourage you to do is to create a blank document and play around with shapes.
Create different ones, check all the different Style and Arrangement settings.
Try different things and get some ideas so the next time you create a document you know
what is possible.