Tom Gorham
Based on yesterday’s depressing body of evidence, my guess would be not many.
To add some empirical evidence to my theory, I asked a handful of friends and colleagues whether they used styles. The answers were uniformly negative. Three thought that applying styles was simply too much of a hassle. Another, more brusque, answer was: ‘What’s the point?’
However, there’s a point to styles. Starting with the bleedingly obvious, styles help to assure consistent formatting in a document. They also save time by making it easier to format and adjust text, and they impose a visual hierarchy of headings and text in a document, which should make it easier to read and understand. Furthermore, styles help to ensure that imported and exported documents look as they should – Pages will happily import styles from Word documents, for example.
Even beyond these roles they’re useful. They can automatically generate tables of contents for any document, and can even be used as a navigational tool for working around lengthy and otherwise impenetrable files.
So why the reluctance to use them? If you’d been weaned on Word’s cumbersome styles, which made managing styles a bit of a dark art, you’d be excused for being wary of them, but styling text in Pages is supremely simple, particularly because, unlike in Word, you apply, edit and delete files in a single place: Pages’ Styles drawer.
It’s also easy to understand the basic style types. Paragraph styles apply formatting to a paragraph, character styles do the same to characters or words, and list styles do the same to lists.
Creating styles is the work of a second or two. You format the text on the page as you want it, and click the ‘+’ button at the bottom of the Styles drawer to add and name the new style. You can apply the style to any other selected text by clicking on it in the drawer. It’s as trivial a matter to alter a style: make local adjustments to the text, click the arrow next to the style name and choose ‘Redefine Style from Selection’. Every occurrence of that style is changed.
You can also mix and match style types. Applying a character style over a paragraph style overrides it, but that doesn’t apply the other way: if you apply a paragraph style over a character style, Pages retains the character style. To change it you need to click the arrow to the right of the style name in the drawer and choose ‘Revert to Defined Style’ from the drop-down list.
Thus far, fairly simple. However, setting styles can get even faster. You can set function keys as style-setting hot keys: again, just click the arrow next to the style’s name and choose a function key to apply. You’ll first have to override Apple’s built-in functions: in the Keyboard System Preferences pane, click the Keyboard tab and check the box labelled ‘Use all F1, F2, etc keys as standard function keys’.
Even in documents that I’m not sharing with others, though, I’ve found styles useful as a navigational device through Pages’ Table of Contents feature. In the Document Inspector, select the Table of Contents tab and check the paragraph styles of the text you want to include in the contents. By clicking the ‘Make page numbers links’ checkbox at the bottom, you can embed hyperlinks. To create the table, place the insertion point where you want the table of contents to appear and choose Insert > Table of Contents. Clicking the page number in the table of contents transports you to the relevant part of the document immediately. The one hassle about tables of contents is updating them, but even here Pages is user friendly: as you update styles in the document, you only need to click back in the table of contents for it to update.
Here’s another navigational trick. Ever wondered what that small Action button at the bottom of the document window does? It allows you to define which part of the document the arrow buttons at the bottom of the window will scroll to. The Action button offers several choices, including scrolling by page or section. However, you can also set Pages to scroll to a particular paragraph or character style. Select one of those options, and then use the Up and Down arrows to scroll to the next or previous instance of that style. Once set up, I’ve found it a fantastically easy way to move between headings in a document, removing the need to divide the document into separate sections.
A more prosaic reason to start using styles is to mimic some text formatting features found in Word that are otherwise missing from page. A simple example: Word can select text – styled or unstyled – with the same formatting, making it easy to reformat text quickly. It’s one of those tiny features that those moving from Word to Pages gripe about, as there’s no equivalent feature in Pages. However, Pages will let you find similarly styled text. Click on the arrow next to the style name in the Styles drawer, choose the option to select all occurrences of it and the text will be handily highlighted in the document window.
Word 2011’s Format Painter function – where you can copy the formatting of text and apply it to another area of text – is another function with no equivalent in Pages. Pages’ rather obscure Copy Style and Paste Style commands might look similar, but they don’t work on unstyled text (some elements, such as typeface and justification settings, are transferred, but not font weight, size or style). Paragraph or character styles will transfer smoothly, though.
Talking of Word, it may be that plenty of Word 2011’s flagship new features – template gallery, full-screen view and a publishing mode similar to Pages’ Layout View – look very familiar to Pages users, but it now does have better styling options. I’m jealous of Word 2011’s Styles Guide display, which shows a colour-coded and numbered column in the margins of your page that matches entries in your styles menu, enabling you to quickly see what styles are applied to which text. Pages has no answer to this – the nearest it comes to this is when you select text in a document and any paragraph styles that have been used will be highlighted in the Styles drawer. It’s a rough-and-ready way of checking that no unwanted styles have crept into the document, but that’s about it.
Another Word function of which I’m envious is themes, which is essentially a collection of styles that can be applied to a document to quickly change its appearance. Pages’ only half-hearted answer is through templates: create the styles you want to use across other documents and save the document as a template (File > Save As Template). You can then select it from the Template Chooser when you create a new document. It’s far from perfect, but it will have to do until iWork 11 finally arrives.
