Datasheet
16
Part I: Introducing iWork ’09
Whether a Pages document, a Numbers project, or a Keynote presentation, if
you make the components about one page in length, you almost always have
an easier-to-understand document.
Sharing styles
A style is a collection of attributes, such as fonts, typefaces, colors, and
number formatting. You set up a style and give it a name, and then you can
reuse it throughout your document. Common styles have names, such as
Header, Subheader, Address, or Footnote. Using styles means you can set
one attribute — the style — rather than individually setting the various parts
of the style.
If you use styles, you can change an attribute of the style so that it’s changed
in every occurrence of the style.
iWork supports styles in all its applications.
Letting your Mac do the work
Mac OS X and iWork support scripting of applications. The two primary tools
for scripting are AppleScript and Automator. With a script, your work is
automated. You start the script, and it runs. You can either write scripts or
use the Record feature in ScriptEditor so that your actions are captured auto-
matically into a script.
Scripts are particularly useful for the following:
✓ Repeated tasks: If you have a task that needs to be carried out sev-
eral times with only slight variations, AppleScript is your savior. For
example, you can write a script that retrieves text and images from a
FileMaker database and places them in a Pages document to automati-
cally produce a catalog.
✓ Complex tasks: One of the challenges of complex tasks is remembering all
the steps and sequences. AppleScript can remember them for you. You
may not save time, but a script does the task the same way every time.
✓ Integration tasks: AppleScript excels at integrating applications and
their data. For example, a FileMaker/Pages script would communicate
with FileMaker to retrieve some data, switch to Pages to place it, switch
back to FileMaker to get some more data, and so forth.