iWork '09: The Missing Manual - Softcover

Clark, Josh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0596157584 ISBN 13: 9780596157586

Publisher: O'Reilly Media, 2009

Synopsis

With iWork '09, Apple's productivity applications have come of age. Unfortunately, their user guides are stuck in infancy. That's where iWork '09: The Missing Manual comes in. This book quickly guides you through everything you need to know about the Pages word-processor, the Numbers spreadsheet, and the Keynote presentation program that Al Gore and Steve Jobs made famous.

Friendly and entertaining, iWork '09: The Missing Manual gives you crystal-clear and jargon-free explanations of iWork's capabilities, its advantages over similar programs -- and its limitations. You'll see these programs through an objective lens that shows you which features work well and which don't. With this book, you will:

• Produce stunning documents and cinema-quality digital presentations
• Take advantage of Mac OS X's advanced typography and graphics capabilities
• Learn how to use the collection of themes and templates included with iWork
• Get undocumented tips, tricks, and secrets for each program
• Integrate with other iLife programs to use photos, audio, and video clips

Learn why iWork is the topic most requested by Missing Manual fans. One of the few sources available on Apple's incredible suite of programs, iWork '09: The Missing Manual will help you get the best performance out of Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and more in no time.

About this title

Review

With iWork '09: The Missing Manual, you'll quickly learn everything you need to know about Apple's incredible productivity programs, including the Pages word-processor, the Numbers spreadsheet, and the Keynote presentation program that Al Gore and Steve Jobs made famous. This book gives you jargon-free explanations of iWork's capabilities, advantages, and limitations to help you quickly produce stunning documents and cinema-quality digital presentations.

How Grids Help You Build Better-Looking Pages Documents
by Josh Clark

It’s not always obvious, but just about every professional layout is built on top of a very specific formal structure, a sturdy framework lurking under the surface of even the most complex and dizzying designs. For centuries, artists, printers, and designers have organized their compositions with grids composed of horizontal and vertical lines that invisibly slice the canvas into blocks, or grid units, that help the designer to align and size page elements, as you can see here:

A grid keeps things clean, giving you guidelines to provide consistent placement and spacing throughout your document and to ensure well proportioned elements within individual pages. Grids can help to organize any design, but they’re particularly helpful in providing internal consistency to lengthy documents like books, magazines, or newsletters.

The previous figure shows a pair of pages from the catalog, both of them organized with a six-column grid. For standard portrait pages like these, it’s common to use five- or six-column grids, but that doesn’t mean that you have to crowd your content into five or six narrow columns. Those columns are simply your building blocks, the lines of an invisible ruler that you use to line up your page elements. A six-column grid might contain only two text columns, for example. Both text columns could be three grid units wide, or one could be four and the other two. Or you could reserve one column entirely for white space. While the grid itself is built of uniform blocks, in other words, the design elements that you build on top of it can be all different sizes.

Using alignment guides

You build a grid in Pages using alignment guides, vertical and horizontal guidelines which you conjure from Pages’ rulers and place anywhere on the page, like a virtual T-square. These lines aren’t part of the document itself—they’re visible only when you’re editing, and they don’t show up when you print. They’re unique to every page of the document—every page has its own set of alignment guides that you can tweak and nudge without affecting guides on other pages.

You pluck vertical guides from the vertical ruler, and horizontal guides from the horizontal ruler. To add an alignment guide, choose View-->Show Rulers. Click anywhere inside the ruler and drag the cursor into your document—your pointer now has a blue guideline in its craw, as shown here:

Add alignment guides to your page by clicking in the ruler and dragging into the document. Pull horizontal guidelines (left) out of the top ruler and vertical guidelines (right) from the left ruler. As you drag, Pages shows you the distance of your guideline from the edge of the page.

Drop the line wherever you want it in your document. To move an alignment guide, just drag it to its new location. To remove it entirely, drag it out of the document, and the guide goes up in a puff of smoke.

When you add or move objects, the objects snap to these alignment guides, jumping over to line up automatically with these magnetic guides whenever you drag objects within a few pixels. This makes it effortless to keep things aligned, neatly avoiding the dreaded “one pixel off” syndrome.

About the Author

Josh Clark is a writer, designer, and developer who helps creative people clear technical hassles to share their ideas with the world. As speaker and consultant, he has helped scores of companies build effective websites and mobile apps. When he's not writing or speaking about clever design and humane software, he's building it. Josh is the creator of Big Medium, friendly software that actually makes it fun to manage a website. He's also the author of Best iPhone Apps and iWork '09: The Missing Manual, both published by O'Reilly. Before the rise of the Web, Josh worked on a slew of national PBS programs at WGBH-TV in Boston. He shared his three words of Russian with Mikhail Gorbachev, strolled the ranch with Nancy Reagan, hobnobbed with Rockefellers, and wrote trivia questions for a primetime game show. Now Josh makes words and spins code at his hypertext laboratory globalmoxie.com. He divides his time between Providence, Rhode Island, and Paris, France.

Edition details

• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0596157584
• ISBN 13: 9780596157586
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 888