Making documents
Take control of text, graphics, colours and changes
Wrestling with apps like Pages, Numbers and Keynote? Cut down on wasted time with
these techniques. Apple’s office and productivity apps are generally easy to use, yet you can get even better value from the time you spend with them.
1 Find keyboard characters
In System Preferences’ Keyboard pane, tick ‘Show keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar’ – click the icon this adds to the right end of the menu bar and choose Show Keyboard Viewer to open a virtual keyboard. Hold ≈, å, ç and/or ß – individually or in combinations – to see which character keys you can then press as well in order to type special characters.
2 Find additional symbols
Press ≈+ç+[ spacebar] to show a panel containing a whole bunch of special characters. Use the categories across the bottom to explore, or type in the search bar for part of a character’s description, such as ‘sad’ or ‘fraction’. Double-click any character to paste it at the insertion point’s position in your doc. Recently used Items are displayed at the top of the pane. 3 Expand short keywords into longer phrases In System Preferences’ Keyboard pane, click the Text tab. Here you can set up short character sequences that, when typed, are automatically replaced with longer words or phrases. To save hunting for symbols, you might replace (c) with ©, say. Set shortcuts for phrases, like #spe for ‘See previous email’. Add corrections, such as to turn ‘itouch’ into ‘iPod touch’. These sync to all Mac and iOS devices signed in to the same iCloud account. (Note: some apps ignore these shortcuts.)
4 Tidy up your type
Font Book lets you manage fonts without having to move their files around. In Finder, drag a new font into the app to make it available. To organise fonts, click the plus at the foot of the left column to make a new collection, then drag fonts onto it. Select any font or collection and disable it by clicking the toolbar button that shows a checkbox; the tick goes away and the fonts won’t appear in menus, but they can be re-enabled. For essential system fonts, the tick is greyed out.
5 Ask to keep changes
Apps that don’t use macOS’s Auto Save feature save your work when you close a document’s window, or when you quit an app. If you’ve ever made changes, decided against them, closed the doc and then realised they were saved anyway, it’s because an item in System Prefs >
General is off by default. If your app supports macOS’s Versions feature, you can roll back changes by choosing File > Revert To – or, save the bother: turn on ‘Ask to keep changes when closing documents’ in System Prefs > General.
6 Reduce file size
Save time when sharing a Pages, Numbers or Keynote file using email or a similar method by shrinking its size. Choose File > Advanced > Reduce File Size to downscale and crop embedded graphics to the size at which they’re used, and trim audio or video clips. Don’t do this on the master copy of your doc, in case you need to change it later – make a copy and create an optimised version from it.
7 Mix your own colours
In many apps, ß+ç+C opens the Colours palette. Click a colour on any tab and it appears in the inkwell, bottom left; drag this to a slot on the right; colours here remain available across apps and after restarts. In the third tab, click the cog, choose New, then drag colours from the bottom into the list. You can name your palette and each colour – useful for working on multiple projects.