49 Amazing iWork tricks!
Take greater control of Pages, Keynote and Numbers
The great thing about Apple’s iWork suite of applications – Pages, Numbers and Keynote – isn’t just that most of us have them (sometimes for free!) on our Macs, iPhones and iPads, but that they’re really easy to get started with. Yet that same ease with which you can quickly throw together a document, use one of the built-in templates to create a beautiful presentation, or track some household expenses might mean you don’t dig further into the iWork apps to discover just how much more you can get out of them.
As always, MacFormat is here to help! Over the next few pages, we’re going to uncover some of the tips, tricks and techniques that true iWork masters know and use daily to produce more beautiful and useful documents in less time, and have more fun doing it as well.
We’ll guide you app by app to show you how you can get more from Pages, Numbers and Keynote on your Mac and on your iOS devices, and at the end we’ll show you how everything ties up together to let you share your work and collaborate with colleagues, friends and family through Apple’s iCloud services. We’re also going to share with you some of the invaluable keyboard shortcuts you should know in order to work even faster and more efficiently.
We’ll focus on the most recent versions of the apps, introduced in October 2013, since Apple is heavily pushing these upgrades, and these are the versions you’re likely to have on your Mac. However, even if you’re using an earlier version, the good news is that most of what we’ll show you will apply to them too. It might just be that some of the options have slightly mismatched names, or that you get to them just by doing things a little differently. As always, if you get a bit stuck, it’s worth searching from an application’s Help menu to see if Apple explains there how a feature works in your version.
Of course, it’s worth checking to see if you can upgrade to the most recent versions for free, which will let you follow along exactly with what we’re showing off here. Though it might be a bit naughty, lots of people reported that even if they had older versions of the iWork apps installed, when they checked the Updates tab of the Mac App Store, they found upgrades to the latest versions of all three of them waiting to be installed.
You might be worried about installing these new versions if you have heard that they jettisoned a lot of the rich features available in earlier versions, but don’t be alarmed because your old apps should still be on your Mac, tucked away safely in a folder called iWork ’09.
Besides, after that controversial reboot of the iWork suite a couple of years ago, which brought feature parity and file compatibility between the Mac and iOS versions of the apps, Apple quickly committed to adding features back in, and happily we’re now at the stage where there are plenty of power user features tucked away across the suite for us to share with you. (You’ll find a list of key things reintroduced at support.apple.com/HT202879.)
One last thing: even if you use just one of the three apps, they share so many features that it’s worth reading all the tips because some we’ve listed under a specific app are relevant to all of them.
So make yourself a cup of tea, boot up your Mac, and let’s start discovering how you can get more from Pages, Numbers and Keynote!
Uncover some of the tips, tricks and techniques that true iWork masters use daily