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.