Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now.
On today's episode let's talk about dividing text into columns in Pages.
So Pages is actually the #1 selling app.
You always see it there at the top of the best selling list of the App Store right after
Mountain Lion itself.
So I decided to write an entire book about Pages.
It is called My Pages and it just came out.
You can get it in bookstores and online in places like Amazon.
Here is a link to where you can go to get it directly and buy it right now: http://macmost.com/j-mypages.
Let's take a look at an except from it about how to divide text up into columns from Chapter
Five.
So here is an except from Chapter Five.
You can see that everything is broken into specific tasks like Using Text Columns and
then there is a step-by-step.
The steps are spelled out here with exactly what to do and then there are figures with
callouts to show you what the results are and you can see exactly where to click.
It is very similar to my iPad books and it is part of that same series.
So for using text columns we can see that the steps are to start with a document that
has some text in it.
Click on the Columns button on the toolbar and go to the 2 Columns option.
Then you will see the results.
Let's switch over to Pages and do exactly that.
Here I've got a document that has some text in it.
I am going to select the Columns button here and switch to 2 Columns and then you can see
now I've go two columns in my document.
Now that is the simplest way to do it.
But the steps here continue telling you can bring up the Inspector window.
Go to Layout Inspector and into Layout and you can set the number of columns there as
well.
You can also go further and set the column width.
So let's take a look at that.
I click on here and bring up the Inspector.
I am already at the Layout/Section-Layout.
I can see the columns here.
I can add more columns, like three columns, go back to two and I can indeed set the column
size and even the gutter between these two columns here in the Inspector.
And there is even more.
The steps continue to talk about if you want different numbers of columns for different
sections of the Pages document.
Now it is not exactly sections.
You are going to do what is called a Layout Break here which is outlined in Step 12.
The Layout Break will allow you have some parts of the document with two columns and
some with one.
So for instance we can go back to here and I can set a Layout Break at the end of this
section.
So let's change everything back to one column and then put a Layout Break right here.
So I am going to do Insert and Layout Break.
Now I am going to change this section here to have two columns.
You can see now here this first section here is still one column and this second section
now has two.
I could have put that break right after this heading here.
So I can go down here and insert another Layout Break then I can go back to this one here
and set that to one column and now it is even neater.
There is also a lot of little tips in the sidebar here.
For instance, one that applies to the columns here, Column Breaks, so you can use Insert/Column
Break to force text to jump to the beginning of the next column.
For instance, in here if I wanted this column to go to the top right after this I can put
the cursor there, do Insert, then do Column Break and you can see that it jumps to the
top of the column there.
That can come in very handy if you have specific needs for your layout.
So that's just one little section and there is well over a hundred different sections
that breaks up just about everything you can do in Pages for Mac.
So you can learn all the ins and outs of it.
So if you use Pages to write reports for school or reports for work or just things at home
you can learn all about Pages.
Not just the word processing stuff but a lot of the Page layout stuff.
A lot of people do not know how powerful Pages is as a good Page layout document to create
flyers, newsletters, things like that.
So check it out.
I hope you found this useful.
This is Gary with MacMost Now.