Info Laptop

Having used Microsoft Office for many years, despite my utter disdain for it, nobody was happier than me when Apple launched the iWork applications. For my light office application needs, Pages, Keynote and Numbers are just perfect. Here are a few tips I use to make my time in the iWork apps a little easier.

Multiple Inspector Palettes

If you use any of the iWork ‘09 apps on a daily basis, you’ve no doubt been frustrated by the fact that you’re forever clicking different Inspector tabs to get to various features. Wouldn’t it be handy if you could have more than one Inspector palette open at a time, with different tabs displayed? Thankfully, Apple offers a way to do just that in all the iWork applications.

Multiple Inspector palettes in iWork apps

Hold down the Option key while clicking any of the tab icons at the top of the Inspector palette to have a new palette open with that group of settings showing. This works in Pages, Keynote and Numbers.

Saving Palette Locations

Open and arrange multiple iWork Inspector palettes in all three iWork apps and they’ll be “saved” for the next time you launch an app, opening in the same location as you last left them. As obvious as it may seem, many users never even notice this feature.

Using Document File Info

The Document tab of the Document Inspector palette in Pages contains some great features. Here you can view raw stats of your document, such as word and character count, enter author, title, and keyword info, and file comments.

At the bottom of the palette, just below where Pages indicates how many times the document has been printed, you’ll find a Show File Info button. Clicking this button opens the File Info box of your document in the Finder. From there, you can adjust permissions, hide the file extension, view more data about your file, and enter Spotlight comments for easy searching.

Saving Spotlight comments in Pages '09

The one thing that I’m left wondering is why Apple didn’t have Pages automatically place the Comments from within the Document Info palette into the Spotlight Comments area in the Get Info box, instead of forcing you to copy/paste.

Keynote and Numbers offer the same feature in their Document Inspector palette.

Protecting your files

Password Protecting Files

In iWork ’09, Apple added the ability to password protect your documents. Microsoft Office apps have had this feature for quite a long time, so it’s nice to finally see it in iWork’s applications.

In the same Document tab of the Document Inspector at the bottom, you’ll find a checkbox, which when clicked will pop open a dialog box where you can enter a password and hint for your file. This is a great addition to the iWork suite, especially if you work in a server/multi-user environment.

M.I.A.: Drag & Drop

Much of the Mac OS offers the ability to drag and drop files, text, and images from one app to another. For some inexplicable reason, iWork apps are different. Though you can drag text from one app to another, you can’t do the same with objects and images. For this reason, you should keep the Media Browser palette open to make it easy to drag images into your documents from iPhoto, or folders located on your hard drive.

Adding More Shadow

You probably know you can add a shadow to your text simply by selecting the text container and clicking the Shadow button in the main toolbar. If you’re looking for a bit more from your shadow, try adding a second one.

Adding a second drop shadow to text in Pages

Once you’ve customized the appearance of your shadow using the Graphic Inspector, select the text itself (rather than the text container) and apply a second shadow using the Fonts palette Shadow button. A second shadow will appear beneath your text, which is completely customizable separate from the original shadow.

While these tips are certainly not Earth-shattering, I hope I’ve been able to share at least one tip you didn’t know about. How about you, do you have any handy tips for using any of the iWork applications?

This is the first in a series on some of the more advanced functionality of Numbers, my favorite spreadsheet app. If you are new to spreadsheets, or just want to make them look a little less like Microsoft Excel, this article should be right up your alley. In this article, we’ll talk about conditional formatting.

What is conditional formatting?

The real power behind spreadsheets is not just how well they can crunch data, but how you can visually present the information in a variety of ways. Sometimes, however, you may want to give more attention to a particular area, or hide certain data if it is not relevant. You often see conditional formatting applied to financial spreadsheets where positive values are in black or green, but negative values are always in “the red.” So how do you do that? That is where conditional formatting, or formatting based on certain criteria, comes into play.

Here’s a quick example. Let’s say I have something that shows you my net worth for each month of the year. (These numbers are completely made up for demonstration purposes.) Assuming that these numbers were coming from a different spreadsheet, I could likely have one of three possible values for each month. If I were doing well, the value would be a positive number. If I were feeling the toils on the economy and not so great at managing money, the value could be negative. The last option would be if we haven’t gotten to a particular month yet, for example, September 2009, then the value might read “$0” as no data yet exists to calculate that value.

Net Worth without Conditional Formatting

Applying some formatting

Based on this example, you can see that before I begin to do any formatting, I have a mix of positive values, negative values, and some that read “$0” because we haven’t entered those months yet. To apply formatting, I would select the first cell next to January.

In the Inspector under the Cells tab, you’ll see an area that is labeled “Conditional Format” with zero rules applied. If I click “show rules” I will get a new window that allows me to start stacking on a series of rules that I want to compare this cell against.

For this example, I’m going to pick “Choose a rule” and select “Greater than.” If I enter “0” as my value, I’m telling Numbers that I want to apply special formatting to any value that is greater than zero. This would be where my net worth was in the positive numbers. If I click the “edit” button, I can now start layering on formatting. To keep things simple, I’m just going to change the text color to green and press “done.” You do have options here for a variety of other formatting choices, including bold or italics and changing the cell background. Looking back at your document, you should see that the value has now turned green!

Now I’m going to apply another rule, this time to address negative net worth. This rule is going to be “less than 0” and I am going to format the text to be a red color with bold styling.

Finally, I am going to apply one last rule which will address the “0” values for upcoming months. Usually, you will not see a net worth perfectly at “0,” so I have used this assumption to keep our “0” values open for this next example. If a value is “0,” we’re assuming its because we are at a month where nothing has happened yet, so we will simply want to “hide” this value until an actual value (positive or negative) can take its place. To solve this, we’re going to format the cell to take values that are “0” and turn the text white, so it will simply blend in with our background and therefore be hidden.

One down. A few to go.

Once we are finished here, we can close this window and go back to our spreadsheet. Now we’ve laid out the set of conditional formatting rules, but they currently only apply to the net worth listed in January. The next step most would take is to simply grab the little dot on the right of the cell and drag down to “fill” down, but do not do this. You will inadvertently fill down the value of that cell and not its formatting.

Net Worth with Conditional Formatting Applied

The last trick up my sleeve is how to copy formatting between cells and that is to use a feature called “Copy Style.” This is similar to the “Format Painter” of Microsoft Excel. Simply highlight the cell we were working on, go to the Format menu and select “Copy Style.” You can then highlight the remaining cells, go back to the Format menu and select “Paste Style” and you should end up with something that looks like the image to the right.

The Copy/Paste Style is a very useful tool and is found in all of the iWork applications. There is even a quick button to access it that you can add to your toolbar (open the View menu and then click “Customize Toolbar”).

If you are familiar with Conditional Formatting from Excel, nothing has really changed except the limit to the number of rules you can apply. Microsoft Excel previously limited users to applying three rules to a cell (usually that was more than enough) and, as far as I’ve found, Numbers imposes no limit. In the next article, we’re going to dig a little deeper into the power of Numbers with how to do horizontal and vertical lookups. If you have any Numbers-specific topics you would like me to cover, please use the comments below and let’s get the discussion started!