How to Work with shapes in iWork apps

Break up a shape

One of our favorite things about many of Apple’s own shapes, such as this map, is the way you can break them up. Click Shape in Pages’ toolbar, choose a shape, then Ctrl-click the object added to your document and choose Break Apart.

Change a bit

You’ll see the shape broken down into its various parts. Each part can then be individually selected and changed. Here we’ve selected Great Britain, switched its color from blue to red and added a shadow.

Throw some shapes

Things get interesting when you combine two or more shapes together. Here we’ve used the Shape button to add a square and a star to our document. We’ve then moved the star so it’s on top of the square, and selected both.

Find the overlap

Open the Format inspector and click Arrange. There are four icons at the bottom. The first, Unite, merges the selected shapes. The next option, Intersect, shows where the two shapes overlap, as demonstrated here.

Combine the shapes

For the effect shown here, we’ve used the Subtract command to remove the part of the shape layered on top. If we’d chosen Exclude, we’d have a single point sticking out to the right of the main shape – fun, but not what we want here.

Give it a name

If you’re likely to save a lot of shapes, it’s a good idea to give them descriptive names, especially if they’re visually similar to one another. There’s a search field at the top of the shapes library to help you find things later.

Take bits away

Click Subtract and any bits where the shapes overlap are removed. In our example, the star shape has been cut out of the square; the advantage of this over simply making the star white is that the cut-out element is transparent.

Add other bits

When adding text boxes, you might find that one of them appears to vanish when you add a second. That is due to text wrapping. With the second box selected, open the Format inspector, click Arrange and set text wrap to None.

Use in other apps

The shapes library is shared between the three iWork apps. So, if you add an item to it in Pages, you can use the same shape in Numbers or Keynote (and vice versa). Shapes are listed with the most recent addition at the bottom.

Get more creative

Undo that, and let’s have some fun by combining shapes. Color the star black. You can rotate the star by holding down Cmd and dragging one of its corner handles. Let go of Cmd and move the star around to get the effect you like.

Save your shape

You can save your shapes to the library, but note that you can’t save text boxes used alongside as part of them. Select your shape(s) and choose > Shapes and Lines > Save to My Shapes. You can then reuse your creation in an instant.

Format the shape

Your shapes work just like those Apple provides, so you can use the various fill, shadow, opacity and color options. You can also break the image apart into its component shapes if you want to tweak it.