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Mac Tip: Give Pages a try

The biggest complaint teachers had about their new Mac laptops was that Microsoft Office was not available. Some teachers

installed a personal version of Microsoft Office and many others are using Open Office which is available on Macs and PCs at H-B.

I have Microsoft Office installed on my iMac, but I wish I didn't. I deleted it from my laptop and go to great pains not to use it on my iMac. Why? It freezes my computer. I prefer to use iWorks which includes Pages for word processing, Numbers for spreadsheets and Keynote for presentations. I've used Keynote before. It is like PowerPoint on steroids, but I just started using Pages this September. Now it is my favorite word processor. Pages and Numbers are also available on H-B iPads.

Give Pages a try. Here are a few tips to get you started:

Drag existing Word documents on top of the icon on your dock or open Pages from your Applications folder and then select the name of an existing Word document.
Check out the Inspector on the toolbar. The Inspector is a tool window that has many of the advanced features like document settings, text wrap, lists, tables and more. I was new to the Inspector but now find it on many Mac and even some PC applications.
Save as a Word Document if sharing with Windows users. (We can open their files, but they can't open ours.)
Check out the Template Chooser - Pages comes with beautiful templates for newsletters, brochures, flyers, certificates and more. You won't be looking for Microsoft Publisher after you use a few of these templates.
Watch the Welcome to Pages video available from the Help menu in Pages, or look at the Pages overview on the Apple website.