How To Use Alignment Guides In Mac Pages

There are three kinds of alignment guides in Pages. Learn how to use them to quickly align objects in word processing or page layout documents.



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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to use alignment guides in Pages.
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So aligning guides in Pages help you line up different objects so they are all centered to each other or they all are aligned to the left or the right. Let's start by taking a look at a word processing document. Remember there are two different types of documents in Pages. I'm going to choose the Blank template here to start a new document. By default I'm in Word Processing Mode. You can tell by going to File, and you'll see Convert to Page Layout. So I'm now in Word Processing Mode. If I used this I would convert to Page Layout.
Now Word Processing Mode gives you a big text box in the middle of each page that flows from page to page. It's helpful if we actually see this by going to View, and then Show Layout. Now we see the big text box and we see the text cursor blinking there in the upper left hand corner. We also see the Header space there and if I scroll to the bottom of the page we see the Footer at the bottom. Now let's go and add an object to the page. Let's just add a box. So here's a box here and let's say I drag that box over to the left and to the right. At times you can see a little yellow line flash. That's an Alignment Guide. There's an Alignment Guide at the center of the page. So if I move this to the center you can see how this square snaps to the middle. You see the Alignment Guide appear when I'm there. Likewise if I go to the left a bit you can see the right side of the box snap to the center. There's also an Alignment Guide on the left side of the page and one on the right side. There's one at the top as well and also one at the bottom. So it's easy to snap something to the center of the page. As a matter of fact there's also one in the vertical center, like that. I can combine it by snapping to both. I don't have to do anything special, hold any special keys down. It appears automatically when I'm just close to those. So now I've got this box at the exact center of the page without much effort.
Let's go and take a look in Pages Preferences and under Rulers we can see Alignment Guides. Here's where we can set the color for the Alignment Guides if we don't like yellow. We can also determine whether or Alignment Guides are at centers of objects or at the edges of the objects. Now let's go and add some Persistent Alignment Guides. These are guides we add on our own. One thing I want to change here is this checkbox. I want to check, Show Vertical Ruler Whenever Rulers Are Shown. So now when we go to View, and then Show Rulers, we're going to get a ruler at the top and a ruler on the left. The rulers are important because you need them to create these guides. If I were to go up here to this ruler, click and drag down, I would create one of these guides. I can do the same thing here from the left. Click and drag and now I've created these guides. I can click and drag these guides to whatever location I want. Notice I get a number there. So if I wanted this to be exactly 2 inches I could. If I wanted this to be exactly 2 inches I could get there.
So now I've created these guides. Notice that they are always there unlike the center guide that kind of appears when you're close to it. These are always there but they snap to objects in the same way. So if I wanted to create an object here and then create another object here I could line them up really nicely.
Now there's another type of Alignment Guide. It's also automatic like the first type. It is guides that align objects to other objects. So now that I've placed the square here, if I take the circle and I drag it here, notice how guides appear to help me have it match this object exactly. Or I can match the top to the center or the top to the bottom or the left to the right. These guides make it really easy to align things up. So they are perfectly aligned like that. As a matter of fact I can create another shape like this and I can put it here. Then I can set this up to be perfectly aligned there and another shape, if I wanted, to be perfectly aligned to the center with this one and this one, like that.
So you have three types of alignment guides. The ones that are automatically there at the center and edges of the page. You've got the ones that can create yourself by dragging from the rulers. You've got ones that allow you to align one object to other objects.
Another thing you should know is when you are composing text, so the text cursor is blinking, going up here to this ruler will actually create tabs to create a ruler either have something that's not text selected like this. Then you can create a ruler. Or if you do have some text selected like that just make sure you go to the left side of the ruler there and drag down. Another thing you should know is that if you add another page here, so let's go ahead and insert a Page Break, on the second page here notice the rulers are not there. The rulers are on the first page but not the second. So any rulers you add in Word Processing Mode are just for the current page.
Now let's create a new document but this time we're going to convert it to Page Layout Mode. This gets rid of that body text in there. If I now go to Show Layout you can see the Header and the Footer at the bottom but nothing here. I can turn on Rulers and I can see those. If I try to add a shape here you can see I can snap to the center guide but there is nothing on the left or the right except all the way to the left side here against the ruler. But there is no margins there. This is just the left side of the page. The zero part.
Now, I get the same default rulers here. I get the centered rulers like that. I also can create another shape here and show you that I get the rulers that allow you to align objects to each other like that. I can add my own rulers like this. Now let's go and turn On Page Thumbnails. We can see those over here. Let's add a new page. You can see on the first page I've got those guides. On the second page, just like in Word Processing, I don't have the guides anymore. The guides you create are only for the current page. However, in Page Layout Mode you have templates. So I can go to View, and then Edit Page Templates. I can see here I have one page template. So in this Page Template I can add a guide, maybe a couple of guides like this. That's added to the template. I'll click Done and now I'm back here and notice that those guides are actually here. That's one of them. That's not one of them. That's one we added to that page. Let's get rid of it. That's also one we added to the page. I can see the other one right there and here's the one towards the bottom. These guides are added to the template not to the page itself. So notice I can't select them. I can't move them. In order to do that I would have to go back to Edit Page Templates. But since both of these pages use that one template, there's only one template in this document, if I go to the second page notice that the guides are there.
Of course you can create another template here for Pages. This one could have different guides on it. Let's put just one and maybe two here at the top like that. Now you could see each template has its own alignment guides. So now when I, say, I'm done I can look at this page and see Okay this is from that blank template. This is also from that blank template. Let's add a page and I have to choose the template. Let's use the other template here. This has those two guides at the top. So different guides for each one. Plus, if I were to go in and Edit the templates and change the guides, let's move this one all the way to the top here, when I'm done those guides are now moved on those pages. They are using that same template. So the guide change is reflected in both of those.
If you go back to Pages Preferences here notice that you can change the color of the Page Template Guides. Let's change that to more of a red right here. Now you can see those are red. So any I would add to the page that are not part of the template now are yellow.
So there you go! That's how you can deal with guides in Pages. It's not as robust as you're going to get in some graphic's apps where you can set the precise location of different guides. When you can Copy and Paste guides from one page to the other. You can't really do that in Pages. But it does provide the basic functionality and helps you quickly align different objects, build page layouts for things like newsletters really quickly. So it's worth knowing about them and how to use them.
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching. Related Subjects: Pages (178 videos)
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