iWork '09: The Missing Manual [Paperback]

Josh Clark (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0596157584 | ISBN-13: 978-0596157586 | Publication Date: May 1, 2009 | Edition: 1

With iWork '09, Apple's productivity applications have come of age. Unfortunately, their user guides are stuck in infancy. That's where iWork '09: The Missing Manual comes in. This book quickly guides you through everything you need to know about the Pages word-processor, the Numbers spreadsheet, and the Keynote presentation program that Al Gore and Steve Jobs made famous.

Friendly and entertaining, iWork '09: The Missing Manual gives you crystal-clear and jargon-free explanations of iWork's capabilities, its advantages over similar programs -- and its limitations. You'll see these programs through an objective lens that shows you which features work well and which don't. With this book, you will:

• Produce stunning documents and cinema-quality digital presentations
• Take advantage of Mac OS X's advanced typography and graphics capabilities
• Learn how to use the collection of themes and templates included with iWork
• Get undocumented tips, tricks, and secrets for each program
• Integrate with other iLife programs to use photos, audio, and video clips

Learn why iWork is the topic most requested by Missing Manual fans. One of the few sources available on Apple's incredible suite of programs, iWork '09: The Missing Manual will help you get the best performance out of Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and more in no time.

Editorial Reviews

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

Josh Clark is a writer, designer, and developer who helps creative people clear technical hassles to share their ideas with the world. As speaker and consultant, he has helped scores of companies build effective websites and mobile apps. When he's not writing or speaking about clever design and humane software, he's building it. Josh is the creator of Big Medium, friendly software that actually makes it fun to manage a website. He's also the author of Best iPhone Apps and iWork '09: The Missing Manual, both published by O'Reilly. Before the rise of the Web, Josh worked on a slew of national PBS programs at WGBH-TV in Boston. He shared his three words of Russian with Mikhail Gorbachev, strolled the ranch with Nancy Reagan, hobnobbed with Rockefellers, and wrote trivia questions for a primetime game show. Now Josh makes words and spins code at his hypertext laboratory globalmoxie.com. He divides his time between Providence, Rhode Island, and Paris, France.

Product Details

• Paperback: 896 pages
• Publisher: Pogue Press; 1 edition (May 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596157584
• ISBN-13: 978-0596157586
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #22,174 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #1 in Books > Computers & Technology > Apple > AppleWorks
  • #22 in Books > Computers & Technology > Operating Systems > MacOS
  • #95 in Books > Computers & Technology > Graphic Design > Web Design

More About the Author

Josh Clark is a designer specializing in mobile design strategy and user experience. He's author of "Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps" (O'Reilly, 2010) and "Best iPhone Apps" (O'Reilly, 2009). Josh's outfit Global Moxie offers consulting services and workshops to help media companies, design agencies, and creative organizations build tapworthy mobile apps and effective websites, with clients including eBay and Nokia.

Josh is a regular speaker at international technology conferences, regularly educating designers, managers, and developers about mobile strategy and designing for phones and tablets.

Before the internet swallowed him up, Josh was a management consultant at Monitor Group in Cambridge, Mass, and before that, a producer of national PBS programs at Boston's WGBH. He shared his three words of Russian with Mikhail Gorbachev, strolled the ranch with Nancy Reagan, hobnobbed with Rockefellers, and wrote trivia questions for a primetime game show. In 1996, he created the uberpopular "Couch-to-5K" (C25K) running program, which has helped millions of skeptical would-be exercisers take up jogging. (His motto is the same for fitness as it is for software user experience: no pain, no pain.)

Josh holds a B.A. from Harvard College in Cambridge, Mass.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

113 of 117 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars iWork 09 The Missing Manual is more than a manual, May 1, 2009

By 

Hartley J. Jackson (Lyndonville, VT United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: iWork '09: The Missing Manual (Paperback)

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.

34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended, January 18, 2010

By 

Abbott Schindler - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: iWork '09: The Missing Manual (Paperback)

Brief introduction... I got this book as I was just starting to use iWork. I was extremely frustrated by the application and to make matters worse, I'd agreed to demo the app at a Mac User Group meeting. I was in trouble, and iWork's built-in Help didn't cut it for me. Apple has a lot of tutorials on their web site, but I learn better by sitting down with the application and having a book at hand. Having benefitted from several other "Missing Manuals", that's where I turned for help this time.

Bottom line: this book really reveals iWork's power, and it does so gently and interestingly. Josh Clark writes very clearly and succinctly, and the book contains (for me) just enough illustrations to thoroughly communicate what's needed. Clark walks through every program element I could find and leads the reader to understand how iWork's elements and UI approach fit together. That's important. I'd highly recommend "iWork '09: The Missing Manual" to any iWork '09 user. Also, because of what this book revealed to me, I can now recommend iWork '09 to many Macintosh users who need "office" capabilities and would like a more usable software application than "some of the others" out there.

iWork '09 can be a perplexing application. As I told the user group, all of the important functions are very accessible--almost right in front of you--but you won't see them. And each of the three component applications works the same way, but that's not necessarily obvious when you first open them. There's almost a Zen to working with iWork '09, and that's what I came to understand, thanks to The Missing Manual.

I'm a cover-to-cover reader, and this volume is definitely readable that way. Useful information lies on each page, and by around page 150 I was convinced that Pages '09 is almost as powerful as Apple says. "iWork '09: The Missing Manual" quickly and almost effortlessly got me to where I'm producing fairly advanced documents and presentations after a very short time. And, importantly, it enabled me to introduce long-time Pages users to a number of incredibly useful features that they needed, but didn't know existed. In fact, several of them said they were heading right out to buy this book so they could see what else they've been missing.

The only real issue I had with the book is its claim to have been completely written with Pages '09. The problem I have is that according to both the book and everything else I've read, Pages '09 is unable to create an index. Yet the book has an index. I wonder how it was created. This nit plagues me, as I've written a couple of books and would love to use Pages for the next one...if it could create an index.

45 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Missing Manual indeed - truly squeezes the most out of iWork09, May 31, 2009

By 

Rudy "pain-doc" (Columbia, SC USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: iWork '09: The Missing Manual (Paperback)

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!