Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5148 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 888 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780596157586
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
With iWork '09: The Missing Manual, you'll quickly learn everything you need to know about Apple's incredible productivity programs, including the Pages word-processor, the Numbers spreadsheet, and the Keynote presentation program that Al Gore and Steve Jobs made famous. This book gives you jargon-free explanations of iWork's capabilities, advantages, and limitations to help you quickly produce stunning documents and cinema-quality digital presentations.

How Grids Help You Build Better-Looking Pages Documents
by Josh Clark

It’s not always obvious, but just about every professional layout is built on top of a very specific formal structure, a sturdy framework lurking under the surface of even the most complex and dizzying designs. For centuries, artists, printers, and designers have organized their compositions with grids composed of horizontal and vertical lines that invisibly slice the canvas into blocks, or grid units, that help the designer to align and size page elements, as you can see here:

A grid keeps things clean, giving you guidelines to provide consistent placement and spacing throughout your document and to ensure well proportioned elements within individual pages. Grids can help to organize any design, but they’re particularly helpful in providing internal consistency to lengthy documents like books, magazines, or newsletters.

The previous figure shows a pair of pages from the catalog, both of them organized with a six-column grid. For standard portrait pages like these, it’s common to use five- or six-column grids, but that doesn’t mean that you have to crowd your content into five or six narrow columns. Those columns are simply your building blocks, the lines of an invisible ruler that you use to line up your page elements. A six-column grid might contain only two text columns, for example. Both text columns could be three grid units wide, or one could be four and the other two. Or you could reserve one column entirely for white space. While the grid itself is built of uniform blocks, in other words, the design elements that you build on top of it can be all different sizes.

Using alignment guides

You build a grid in Pages using alignment guides, vertical and horizontal guidelines which you conjure from Pages’ rulers and place anywhere on the page, like a virtual T-square. These lines aren’t part of the document itself—they’re visible only when you’re editing, and they don’t show up when you print. They’re unique to every page of the document—every page has its own set of alignment guides that you can tweak and nudge without affecting guides on other pages.

You pluck vertical guides from the vertical ruler, and horizontal guides from the horizontal ruler. To add an alignment guide, choose View-->Show Rulers. Click anywhere inside the ruler and drag the cursor into your document—your pointer now has a blue guideline in its craw, as shown here:

Add alignment guides to your page by clicking in the ruler and dragging into the document. Pull horizontal guidelines (left) out of the top ruler and vertical guidelines (right) from the left ruler. As you drag, Pages shows you the distance of your guideline from the edge of the page.

Drop the line wherever you want it in your document. To move an alignment guide, just drag it to its new location. To remove it entirely, drag it out of the document, and the guide goes up in a puff of smoke.

When you add or move objects, the objects snap to these alignment guides, jumping over to line up automatically with these magnetic guides whenever you drag objects within a few pixels. This makes it effortless to keep things aligned, neatly avoiding the dreaded “one pixel off” syndrome.

About the Author

Customer Reviews

iWork 09 The Missing Manual is more than a manual
From the overall organization of iWork '09: The Missing Manual to the examples used and phrases selected, Josh Clark has written this book to show us how to do what we want to do in iWork. He has succeeded. It is much better than just a manual.
Other iWork books are organized based upon the history of the program's development. They start with Keynote. iWork '09 The Missing Manual starts with Pages because that is what most people will use first.
You start with writing in Pages text mode, and are soon learning how to use the new outline features to organize your small book.
You learn that in text mode the text flows like rivers, but layout mode puts text in boxes like islands. You learn to flow your text from one island to the next.
Other iWork books all tell you how to put a text box and a picture on a page. That is not enough when you are looking at a blank page and wondering how to design your own layout.
Josh Clark shows you how to create a 6 column, or 5 column grid, and how to use it to align your objects to create your layout.
He has included more interesting information and useful tips than you will find in most manuals. Here are some examples:
Why does Pages open at 125% resolution when 100% is the "actual size?" This book has the answer.
If you make a mistake when you ask your Macintosh to learn a new word, here you will learn how to remove it from your dictionary.
He also tells you how to match a color in your photograph so you can use it in other objects.

In iWork '09 The Missing Manual you will learn more than the instructions for Keynote. You will learn how to plan, make and give a Keynote presentation that will engage your audience in your story, and to not use bullet points to tell your story. You will also learn when you should and should not use the new transitions.

The examples Josh Clark uses are suitable for most of us. To teach us to use Numbers, he uses a membership roster as an example of using a formula to transform text, and uses logic formulas to summarize our team's baseball statistics.

You will also learn about sheets and tables as well as the new multi-row headers and footers, and freezing the header for large spreadsheets.

As I read iWork '09 The Missing Manual I got the impression that Josh Clark really enjoyed writing this wonderful book. Because I thought he enjoyed writing it, I enjoyed reading it. After reading the online in Rough Cut, I bought the book. If you read this far, I believe you will want to buy it too.

The Missing Manual indeed - truly squeezes the most out of iWork09
Nearly all the "Missing Manuals" have been right on target; and this is one of the very best -- beats Apple's disjointed iWork manuals by leagues. Starting with Pages, Josh Clark nicely lifts the confusion of (malnamed) 'floating' versus 'inline' objects; puts the important word processing details (for instance the handy 'Outlining' feature, that got a scant one-page brushoff in Apple's manual) in perspective. He clarifies the distinction between pretty design objects and serious work, and makes it obvious that Pages has the power to become a freestanding no-nonsense 'iWord', rather than part of a Jack of all trades approach. Shortcuts, tips, and thinking outside the box abound; clearly, the author enjoys sharing his perspective with the reader, the writing is crisp and airy, the examples are handy, and tough concepts such as layers become understandable so as to exploit the full power of 'iWord'.

The Numbers chapters, likewise, are outstanding; the 3-step drilling down selection process (table, cell and text) finally helped me understand how and what to select for editing, rather than just aimlessly clicking around till you got it right. Same for the difference between Table and Print views, and proper use of the Return key. Functions, Formulas and Styles become a breeze using the keep-it-simple approach. The one thing missing (at least from the Index) was how to lock Tables and individual cells. So occasionally you may have to print a page from the on-line help. iWork09 was updated recently to version 2--we don't know what changed but crashes, or lockups trying to empty the trash have vanished.

You really can't do professional grade word processing or spreadsheeting without this in-depth, yet light-spirited, guide. Well worth the price!

i work 09 Review from Craig
This is so much better than the same information in the Apple series book. It is very well written and easy to follow. It is written in such a way that you do not have to be a Apple wiz to get the information you need.

Craig