This is the inspector window. It is is Pages and Keynote and you use it to adjust things. To access different inspector panes you click the appropriate icon – document, text, shapes, rulers etc. Here’s a great tip: If you hold down option while clicking it will open a new inspector window alongside the existing one!

You can have more than one inspector window open at a time. Simply option-click the icon instead of clicking it and a second inspector window will open.

After the window opens you can move it where you want it to be.

To open multiple inspector windows just use option click when clicking an icon in the inspector window.

A photo object is a photo of an object without any background that you can can insert into a webpage or word processing document. Online clipart services such as photo.com and istockphoto have photo objects you can purchase, but here he’s how to make a photo object from any photograph using Pages, the standard OSX word processor.

Here is a photo of a camera, before and after we turn it into a photo-object.

Before

After

Step one is to open the image in pages. It helps if the background colour is different to the photo. For example if you have a black object on a black background it will be hard to differentiate the two.

Open the image in a new pages document

Next select “Instant Alpha” from the “Format” menu.

2. Select Instant Alpha from the format menu

The cursor will now turning to a cross-hair. Click anywhere on the background of the photograph behind the main object, an drag the cursor. This will cause the instant alpha tool to select all parts of the background that have a similar colour. You may need to do this multiple times if the background has various colours. Keep doing this until all the background has been selected. In the picture below you can see me highlighting a small section of the background in the middle of the photo – It is highlighted in pink.

Here I am selecting a part of the background using the instant alpha tool.

Once you have finished selecting all the background, click anywhere else in the pages document to finish the Instant Alpha process. You can now move the object wherever you want it in your pages document, or if you would prefer to use it elsewhere, for example in a webpage, simply take a screenshot using Shift-Apple-4 as described here, and this will save the image to your desktop.

My friend Dave has just moved across to mac and he tells me that in Microsoft publisher you can use a booklet template to make a booklet. By booklet I mean A4 pages folded in half to make an A5 booklet that you staple in the middle. To do this all the pages need to be re-ordered, for example, page 8 goes near page 1, page 2 near page 7 and so on. Publisher did this automatically.

With Pages in OS X there is no such built in option to do this automatically, but there is a great little program called ‘create booklet’ that will do it for you when you go to print the document.

You need to download a little program called ‘Create Booklet’ to do it. You can download it directly from here or go to the webpage here.

After you’ve downloaded it, Click on the ‘install- Create Booket PDF Service’
This will install an extra menu item in your printer menu to be able to print booklets.

After you’ve done this, go into Pages and select print, like you are going to normally print a document. But instead of pressing print (in the bottom right corner of the window) select the ‘PDF’ button in the bottom left, and click on ‘Create Booklet’

Your document will automatically be made into a booklet. It will open in a new window, and you can either ‘save’ it as a PDF file (to email to someone or print out later) or you can print it as a booklet to your printer.

Just remember that when you are designing a booklet, it will be printed smaller than usual. The A4 page you see on your screen will be printed on 1/2 an A4 page when you make a booklet, so make all the text a bit bigger than usual. Eg use a 16 point font instead of 12.

Note: There was an application called ‘Cocoa Booklet’ that used to do this but it doesn’t work in Snow Leopard, this is the new way of doing it.

Note: If you want to publish a book, and need a more professional binding solution try this program (it’s not free).

I’m not sure why Apple has never included an ‘autosave’ into Pages or other software for that matter. If you accidentally shut the document without saving, or if the program crashes, you can lose a lot of work. I get very absent minded while I am working, and can sometimes go for an hour or two without remembering to save. Foreversave Lite is a free app that adds autosave to any OS X program. It has lots of different options too.

It’s called foreversave lite click here to download it.

After you install it it will take you through some questions. There’s an option to have it autostart at login – I selected this as I know I will forget to run it otherwise. This means it’s always in the background and whenever I open a Pages document it will automatically save.

Once it’s installed you’ll be greeted with a window like this:

What you now need to do is add the programs that you want the autosave feature to work for. When you click on the plus sign you will see a list of all the running apps:

So for example I click on the plus sign and add pages. You will then be guided through some more options for that program. For pages I chose to save every minute:

You can also choose to save when you switch to another application, and to exclude certain folders form autosaving. Any files in these folders will not be autosaved. Not sure why you’d want this, but I love software with flexibility like this.

Now whenever I have a pages document open, it autosaves every minute.

All this in the lite version! You might be wondering what the full features version does… The full version of ForeverSave lets you browse through all the backups! You can go back to any previously saved version of the document you are working on and have a look at it. A bit like time machine but for an individual document.