Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you two ways that you can build Pages
documents with multiple columns of text. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great
group of supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about it. Join us
and get exclusive content.
There are two ways that you can build Pages documents with multiple column of text. The
first is to simply add columns to the default body text in a word processing document. So
let's create a new Pages document using the basic blank template here. Now what you've
got is a word processing document. You can tell you have a word processing document by
looking at File and it says Convert to Page Layout. That means you're in word processing
mode and not Page Layout mode. A word processing document has one text box that basically goes
from page to page. If you go to View, Show Layout you can see it.So you can see this
big text box that I'm in.
Let me paste some text into here and you can see now it fills up several pages and it just
flows from one page to the next. Now with the cursor somewhere in this text box you
can set this to be multiple columns pretty easily. Just go to the Format sidebar here
and then go to Layout. You'll see Columns and you can increase the number right there.
So now you can see I'm in a two column layout. You can increase it to as many as you want.
You can select the Gutter, so the space between them, and the size for each column. If you
have equal column width then it's always going to match. So I change that to two and then
it goes to two for the second column and a 2½ inch gutter. If I do unequal width then
I can actually have odd widths like that and I'm going to manually set the gutter.
Now this may be all that you want. But notice how it's two columns for every page. So basically
the page goes from the upper left hand corner, down the first column, down the second column
to the lower right hand corner and then back to the upper left hand corner of the second
page. What if you just wanted to do two columns on a single page. You can actually do that
but you're going to have to play around with sections. So you can't just have the text
change from two columns to one column on the next page. If I change it, it's going to change
it for all the pages.
But what you can do is you can put the cursor where you want the page break to be. Inserting
a page break won't help. That just basically has blank space until the beginning of the
next page. But you can insert a Section Break. A Section Break will move to the next page
like before. (I can get rid of the extra space there.) On the second section here I can change
that to be a different number of columns. Now note this is a hard break here. If I were
to keep adding text to this it actually adds another page in-between, before the next section.
So you have to pick the exact moment where it jumps from a two column layout to a one
column layout.
The second way to do this is in Page Layout mode. There you can create your own text boxes.
You could put multiple columns in those text boxes as well. But you can also link text
boxes together to put multiple columns on each page. So this would be if you were creating
something like a newsletter or a flyer or something like that. Create a new document
just as before but now you would go to File and Convert to Page Layout. So now you don't
have that text box anymore that goes page to page. If you go to Show Layout there's
nothing on the page.
Here you would create individual text boxes. So I'll click here to create a text box and
I can paste some text into it as before. Now I can move this text box wherever I want.
You can even make this text box multiple columns. If I go to Format, Text Layout you can put
two columns inside this box. But that's probably not what I want. What I want is to probably
do a custom layout. So I can expand this box here to fill up the page. Let's say I want
to do another column but I want to have it start lower. I'll do another text box and
put that over here. I'm going to have to shrink that a bit and play with the sizes of these
columns.
Now I can have text flow from this box to this box. The way I do that is to click here
and then go to this box and click there. Those little dots at the top now link one to the
other. It wraps from here to here. Now I can do what I need with this text box here. Resize
both of them. Set the gutters as I want to get it exactly what I want for matching the
layout, or whatever it is that I'm doing. So it's highly customizable using two different
text boxes like this. Now if you wanted to continue this on the next page you'll actually
have to add a new page to it. Create a text box here. I'll go up to the top here and click
this number there. I'll go to here and I'll click the dot here at the top and it will
link it automatically to the previous one. So now it flows from here down to this one
and I can create another box there.
This not something you want to do if you have a lots of pages of text. But if you simply
have, like, two columns on this page and then it continues on another page in a third column
then that's fine. It gives you the maximum amount of versatility.
Why do you need multiple columns? Well, there are lots of different reasons. One is, for
instance, you may want to come up with a layout that works with an image in the center. So,
for instance, I can add a photo here and put it in the middle and then have it wrap around
like this which creates a nice looking layout. Also, if I were to click here and do three
columns then I have another option there just by putting the image there in the middle column
like that.
Multiple columns also works great for lists. So here if I have a list of something and
they're all pretty short items you can see how it runs several pages. But I can easily
shorten this to fewer pages by just adding more columns here. You can see how I can fit
the list of a lot of different items using multiple columns.
Another reason to do it is to just get a nice kind of newspaper look to it. In that case
you'll probably also want to go to Style and then set the Alignment to justified. Select
all of the text there and set it to Justified. So now the columns look really nice. You can
also add text boxes for things like Headlines and the text in all the columns will wrap.
Then maybe change this to a font that kind of fits that newspaper style.
So there are many reasons why you may want to use multiple columns in your Pages document.