Once you are satisfied with your template you need to save it for future use. The idea is that content will inherit any character, paragraph, and document formatting attributes, as well as other characteristics that you established in your template. What happens to these placeholders? Well, when the time comes to actually use your template to create your final document, you will replace the placeholders with your actual content. Within your template, you also place any static components, like page numbering, logos and various dingbats you like to pepper your document with, then lock them into place on the template document. Formatting and placing these as desired within your template will allow you to get a good visual feel for your finished document. You can utilize placeholders consisting of dummy "Lorem Ipsum" text as well as generic graphic components and photos. This can be done by starting from a blank document, or you can modify and tweak one of the existing stock templates to your heart's content, using it as a creative starting point for your customized template.īefore you start to create a custom template, you have to pre-visualize the look of your finished product. (See the first illustration) While you certainly can just use these templates to generate your documents, you can create your own templates to fit your special needs. So, enough about me… how can you create these terrifically tantalizing templates?Įach iWork app comes configured with a number of pre-built attractive and useful templates designed for personal and business use.
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This can only be done successfully by taking advantage of the tools that Pages offers, such as the ability to create, store and apply customized styles for formatting a document layout, plus paragraph and character formatting, among others. I go to great lengths to design each template just right so that I can reuse them over and over without any fuss. For example, I use custom templates for articles, lecture notes, exercises and labs, quizzes, surveys, and more. Pages allows me to design – with the inevitable occasional tweaking – a number of customized templates for a variety of specific uses in each of my classes and projects. For instance, for the iPhoneography course I teach at the Delaware College of Art and Design, I use the school's logo in the header, my own personal contact information for student use, plus other graphical elements to set off document sections. I like to "brand" my Pages handouts and other types of documents and Keynote presentations according to which school I will be utilizing them in. I teach a number of Mac, iOS and Photography classes in three different colleges in my area. It may take a while to set them up just right, but they are huge time-savers if you prepare many kinds of documents and presentations. I suppose you can tell that I love templates. Consider a template as a starting point towards your final product. To me, the beauty of all this is that I can apply and present a consistent look-and-feel to my documents and presentations.
When you call up a template file, it actually opens a copy of itself for you to work on, while the original template remains unchanged and closed for future use. In generic terms, a template is a special kind of file that allows you to create documents based on prepositioned and custom formatted objects, graphics, text, and page layout schemes already contained in the template. The Newsletters Templates category is selected in the Pages Template Chooser. They are also called "Templates" in Numbers, but are named "Themes" in Keynote. Let's talk templates specifically, iWork's document templates.įor me, the ability to work with document templates is one of the most valuable productivity features in any app, but especially in all three apps in the iWork suite.įor illustration purposes, I will be referring to the use of templates in the Pages app, but understand that the same mechanisms discussed are shared across the three apps in iWork. Pages for word processing and page layout, Keynote for developing and delivering presentations, and Numbers for creating spreadsheets and charts.
#IWORK NUMBERS TEMPLATES SOFTWARE#
IWork – Apple's office productivity software suite.