Navigate Between Pages in Pages

Apple’s Pages is a seriously underrated word processor application. Ever since being nearly completely redone for iWork ‘08, Pages has been at the same level as Microsoft Word 2004 on almost every level (I don’t have much experience with Office 2008 yet, but Office 2004 is more of a currently accepted standard office suite for OS X). However, unlike Word 2004, Pages is a real Mac application. It runs perfectly on Intel machines, it integrates with your OS X workflow, and does things like you expect it to.

Although Microsoft Word is a much more developed application, as it has been in development for many years, while iWork has only been around for a couple, Pages has quite a few of its own tricks. One of my favorite examples of this is how Pages works with multiple pages in a document. Pages has a few efficient and intuitive methods to switch from one page to another.

The first of these ways is two small arrows appearing at the bottom of every document. Once a document contains more than one page, either one or both of the arrows will turn blue (depending on your location in the document). The buttons work as intuitively as things get–press the arrow pointing up to go one page up, and press the arrow pointing down to go one page down.

The next method to switch between pages is found right next to the two arrows. Look to the left, where some text is located that should say “Page # of #”. At first this appears to just be a great way to keep track of which page the document is opened to, but upon further inspection, this is an ingenious feature that most developers could not come up with. Click on the text, and a new feature will magically appear. You are prompted for a page number, and when you enter it and press Return, Pages directs you straight to that page!

The third method for page navigation is one commonly found in OS X applications. It is simply a page thumbnail pane on the left side, activated by either typing Option-Command-P or selecting View from the menu bar, and then pressing Show Page Thumbnails. Simply clicking on a page thumbnail will prompt Pages to scroll to that page. Alternatively, you can navigate page by page with the up and down arrow keys once you bring OS X’s focus to the thumbnail pane by clicking anywhere in it.

As you’ve seen, like most other Apple-branded OS X applications, Pages takes fine attention to detail. Every little thing seems to be thoroughly thought out, resulting in an excellent and affordable word processor.