Josh Clark is a writer, designer, and developer who aims to help creative people share their ideas with the world. And to that end, Josh is currently working on iWork '09: The Missing Manual. Currently available as a Rough Cut, the new book will teach you 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.

When you buy a book on the Rough Cuts service, you get access to an evolving manuscript. You can read it online, download as a PDF, or print. Once you've purchased a Rough Cuts title, you have a chance to shape the final product--you can send suggestions, bug fixes, and comments directly to the author and editors.

Read this excerpt from Josh Clark's work in progress, (adapted for the web). Then, take a minute to share an iWork '09 tip and you could win free access to iWork '09: The Missing Manual: Rough Cuts Version. (Please post your comments by 5 pm PT on Tuesday, March 3. Plus--you can get bonus points for twittering about this.)

Creating a Pages Document, (excerpted from iWork '09: The Missing Manual.)

Most of us think of a word processor as a glorified typewriter, a simple way to organize ideas and arguments for the printed page. You craft words into paragraphs, juggle them, refine them, and you're done. Tap, tap, tap. Print.

Pages goes a big step further, making it easy not only to compose your documents, but to design them, too. Whether you're publishing a glossy newsletter or just writing a thank-you note to Aunt Peg, Pages gives you the tools and templates to grace your documents with the visual verve your words deserve.

This chapter takes you on a quick tour of your new word-processing digs, helping you find your way around Pages' well appointed interface. You'll jump right into creating your own basic documents with some simple projects that highlight Pages' main features.

Two Programs in One

For all its emphasis on creating gorgeous documents, Pages recognizes that writing is a very different activity than page layout. Pages offers one mode for text-intensive projects, and another for creating more extravagant multimedia designs, as shown in Figure 1-1. This gives Pages an unusual but highly functional split personality: Pages is essentially two programs in one, and when you fire up a new document, you choose the one you prefer for the job at hand.

Meet Pages, the Word Processor

Pages' workhorse word processor puts your text in the spotlight, providing an uncluttered workspace where you can get your thoughts onscreen with a minimum of fuss. Pages doesn't reinvent the wheel here; if you've ever used a word processor before, this will feel familiar. The program's word-processing documents give you one big text area where you type a single, continuous chunk of text, adjusting font styles and formatting as you go. The word processor gives you plenty of options to illustrate your text with images, tables, and charts, but the emphasis remains on your words. From quick to-do lists to opus-length manuscripts, the text itself is the main (and often only) design element in these babies.

Pages supports your writing with a slew of helpful tools like spell checking, outlining, and change tracking, but Apple's word processor still does not have every last feature that you'll find over at the competition. If you've been a Microsoft Word power user in a past life, you may eventually notice some missing features like macros, index building, "word art," and so on. There's a silver lining here: What Pages might lose in skipping this kitchen-sink litany of features it gains back with a light, streamlined environment. As you get acquainted with Pages, you'll find that its slender diet of toolbars and other "window chrome" helps you stay focused on actually getting stuff done. This focus is where the Pages word processor shines.

But where Pages really departs from other programs is in its other half, the word processor's alter ego...

Meet Pages, the Page-Layout Program

Persuasion sometimes requires more than words, and Pages lets you deck out your work with photos, graphics, charts, even movies and music. In page-layout documents, you design your document one page at a time, using lots of smaller elements instead of editing a single monolithic block of text. You shuttle text boxes and graphics around the page, setting your design like a graphic artist pasting up a design board in a less digital era. Sophisticated multipage projects like newsletters, catalogs, magazines, or brochures become a matter of drag and drop. Built-in image-editing tools make graphical single-page layouts like posters, flyers, or invitations a snap.

Choose Your Weapon

When you launch Pages, the program prompts you to choose either a word-processing template (see page xx) or a page-layout template (see page xx), and you're off. But you can't have it both ways. When you create a new file, you pick one format or the other, and you can't switch between the two modes. Once a word-processing document, always a word-processing document; ditto for page layout.

This isn't quite as Draconian as it sounds. Both document types are part of the same program, after all, and it turns out that they share many of the same features. As you'll discover in the coming chapters, you can include page-layout elements in word-processing documents, and you can do word processing in page-layout documents. It's not all or nothing, but rather a matter of emphasis: Does your new document focus on developing a single work of text (word processor), or does it involve the page-by-page layout of several design elements (page layout). Table 1-1 offers some examples.

Using Templates for Ready-to-Go Documents

Don't let all this talk about document design make you nervous. If you were out shopping for plaid pants the day they handed out aesthetic sensibility, it's OK. You've got the style sense of Apple's professional designers behind you. They've stocked the pantry to overflowing with a delicious array of over 180 templates, preformatted documents that can give you a tastefully elegant design right from the get-go.

As soon as you launch Pages, the program greets you by opening a fresh document window and unfurling the Template Chooser (Figure 1-2), a document smorgasbord with a left-hand menu divided neatly into categories for both word-processing and page-layout documents. Here you can choose to start your document from scratch with a blank page (choose a template from one of the Blank categories) or use one of the starter documents (choose any of the other

To help you make your choice, the Template Chooser shows miniature previews, or thumbnails, of the design for each document template. Many of these templates, especially in the Page Layout category, contain several different page designs, and you can quickly leaf through all of them by "skimming" your mouse pointer across the face of the template thumbnail. As you move your cursor, Pages flips through the template's layouts. Need a closer look before you can commit? Nudge the slider at the bottom of the Template Chooser to the right to make the thumbnails larger; move it to the left to make them smaller and fit more into the window at once. Double-click a thumbnail when you've made your choice.

Pages responds by opening a new document window based on your chosen template and gives it the name "Untitled." In addition to offering you lots of design options, these templates are built to last. When you choose a template. Pages actually opens a carbon copy of the original; you're not editing the actual template itself. That way, you can work on your copy, safe in the knowledge that the blueprint is locked away--unmodified--ready for the next time you need it. (You can modify templates if you really need to, and you can create more templates of your own, too. For all the ins and outs of template creation and manipulation, see Chapter 8.)

Tip: Got buyer's remorse? If you're not crazy about your choice after you see it at full size, you can throw it back and start over by closing the window (click the red Close button in the upper-left corner of the document window) and opening a new document: Choose File, New or File, New from Template Chooser.

If you just want to shoot off a quick letter, shopping list, or note, choose the Word Processing category's Blank template and start typing away. Save, print, and you're done. But where's the fun in that? Apple's gone to the trouble of giving you a tidy selection of carefully designed templates. The following sections explore how you can put those templates to good use right away, making it fast and easy to create great-looking documents.

These quick-start introductions provide a high-level overview of Pages' key features to get you working right away, but don't fret: You'll get acquainted with the program's nuts and bolts in the following chapters.

Your First Word-Processing Document

Uh-oh, you've got an inventory problem at the warehouse, and an urgent order for one of your best customers is going to be late. Time to dash off an apologetic letter to break the bad news and smooth things over. At least Pages will help you to do it in style.

Launch Pages, and choose your template: From the Template Chooser, click the Letters category under Word Processing, and select your preferred template in the right pane. For this example, choose Modern Letter. After you choose the template, Pages fills your new document window with the template design, including a few paragraphs of dummy text, ready to be replaced with your own mellifluous prose, as shown in Figure 1-3.

Integration with Address Book

Pages is even smart enough to go ahead and address the letter from you. This info comes straight from your Mac's Address Book program, where Pages looks up your contact info and plucks out your work address. (Some of the other letter templates prefer your home address; this business template assumes that you're at the office. See page XX to find out how to swap your home and work info [[Chapter 4]])

Pages' letter templates include merge fields, smart placeholders for sender and recipient address info which--you guessed it--merge info from Address Book into your letter. Sure enough, you can use your Address Book to grab your customer's contact info, too: Launch Address Book, find your customer, and drag the address card into your document as shown in Figure 1-4. Presto! The name, address, and even the salutation fill in automatically.

Tip: When you drag the address card, be sure to drag it sideways out of Address Book. If you drag up or down, you'll only highlight other address cards.

If you don't have your dear customer in your address book--or if his address card doesn't include info for some of the Address Book fields in the document--you'll wind up with unfilled fields in your letter. You can just delete these stragglers, or replace them by clicking each one and typing them manually.

This Address Book magic isn't limited to documents created from templates. You can add merge fields to your own custom documents and even use Address Book or a Numbers spreadsheet to automate mass mailings to large groups. For details, see page XX [[Chapter 4]].

Note: Using the Address Book to fill in addresses doesn't create an automatic link between your letter and your address book. If you update your customer's info in the Address Book later, you'll need to come back and update your letter separately.

With your addresses taken care of, Pages frees you to focus on the main task: the letter to your customer.

In Your Own Words

Pages' templates include placeholder text to show where you should type the body of your letter within the template's layout. Just click anywhere in the placeholder text and Pages highlights the entire text block. Start typing, and the block disappears to be replaced with your new text. You're off and running.

The next chapter digs into all of the nitty-gritty options for editing and formatting text. For now, we'll keep it simple. If you've ever used a computer before, you already know how this works: Click to place the insertion point where you want to add or delete text. Type the text of your letter, and as you reach the end of each line, Pages automatically takes care of the line breaks for you--there's no need to press Return like you would on a typewriter (reserve the Return key for starting a new paragraph or adding a blank line).

When your text grows too long to fit on a single page, Pages automatically adds another page, jumping your text over to the next sheet automatically. Use the vertical scroll bar on the right side of the window to move up and down through the text, as you would in any computer program (for more on document navigation, see page XX).

When you're ready, save the document so you can come back later and continue working on it.

If you enjoyed this excerpt, buy a copy of iWork '09: The Missing Manual: Rough Cuts Version.