How To Change the Background Color In Mac Pages

You can change the background color on all or some of your pages in Mac Pages. The technique is different depending on whether you are working with a page layout document or a word processing document. It is fairly simple with page layout, and each page has its own background. With word processing, each section can have a section master with a full-page rectangle in the background.


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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today I'm going to show you how to change the background color in Pages.
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So if you want to change the background color in Pages the first thing you need to do is identify whether or not you're doing a page layout document or word processing document. So I have a brand new blank document here which means it's a word processing document. If I want to do page layout, like create a newsletter or flier or poster or something like that my first step would be to switch to Page Layout, right there. Most of the time when you want to change the background color on a page it's because you're doing page layout. Right. You're making a sign or something like that and you want to have something other than white as the background color. So in most cases this is where you'll be.
Let's zoom out here so we can see the entire page. The first thing you need to do is make sure the page is selected and not some sort of element on the page. If the page isn't selected you can click somewhere on the background to get it selected. You can tell it's selected if you see under Format it says Page Layout there. Once you're in that mode it's easy to change the background color of this page. You can change it to whatever you want. So I can do a Color Fill. I can do Gradient and then change the colors that is goes from and to. I can do Advanced Gradient so I can have more than two colors. I can do an Image Fill. It's going to give me a default textured background. But I can choose another image and use that as a background. Set it to many different ways to fill the space. I can do Advanced Image Fill which allows me to do things like scale the image and change things like the color and things like that.
Normally we would be looking at a Color Fill. Now if you have several pages, we'll add two more pages here and turn on Thumbnails on the side, you can see that each page has its own color. So I've set it for this page but the second page just went back to the default. I can go and choose another color for that page. For this page I can go ahead and choose say a gradient fill. I can add another one.
If you want to change the color for all the pages in the document what you need to do is edit the master page. So in the Page layout sidebar here you see a big button for Edit Master Page. If I click that it goes into this special mode where I'm editing the master page. You can see a big blue bar at the bottom. I can change the background color there. So I'll change it to some other color there. I'll hit Done at the bottom to indicate I'm finished. So you notice some of the previous pages changed color and some didn't. It's a little inconsistent how it applies it to pages where there has already been a background set. But if I hadn't been playing around with that all those pages would have been set and any new page I add is going to use the new master page.
Now things are very different if you're doing a word processing document. Here we don't have master pages. As a matter of fact if I click on the background for a page you can see there's nothing in the Format sidebar for it. It's not a page layout document. It's not going to have formatting for the page. But I can still change the color. If I were to take a shape, like a rectangle, and stick it in here and then go and change the arrangement so that it stays on the page and there's no text wrap. You can see I can actually place this item on the page. But it's going to cover the text that's there. The body text for the word processing document is behind any elements I'm going to add.
But all I need to do to get this to work is to go to Arrange and then Move Object to Section Master. Once I do that it puts it behind the page on the section master and every page is going to have it even though the Thumbnails here haven't update. A little bug in Pages. You can see that all of the pages in this section will have this background.
So it's not as simple as with a page layout document. You have to create this rectangle. You have to send it to the background as a master object.
But what if I only wanted to color one page in. Well, the way to do that then is to create separate sections. So for instance here at the end of the first page if I were to insert a section break now I have two sections. Now both sections inherit this background object here. So I'm going to go to Arrange Section Masters and make those editable. Now I can select this rectangle here and I can delete it. Since I'm in section two it's going to delete it for all the pages in section two, even this one here at the bottom that the thumbnail doesn't update. Section one, which is just page one, is going to have this different background.
So it does get a little complex if you're doing a word processing document. But most of the time when you want to change the background color you're doing a page layout document where it's pretty easy.
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