Pages ’09: The Overlooked Bottom Toolbar

Most people don’t pay a lot of attention to the useful little bar at the bottom of a Pages window. Those folks are missing out.

It’s evident that it’ll give you a lot of data at a glance, but those fields do interesting things if you click on them, too. The most obvious example is the zoom controller, which is first in the list; use this to change how your document appears on-screen. This is great if you have trouble seeing smaller text sizes or want an overview of several pages at once.

The second section shows you the word count of your current document if you have no text selected…

…but if you select some text, it’ll show you the count of that text along with the total. Neat!

If you click that word count, it’ll open up the Document Inspector directly to show you even more statistics. And I’m a gal who thinks there can never be too many statistics.

(If you don’t see the word count at the bottom of your Pages window at all, go to Pages > Preferences > General and toggle on Show word count at window bottom.)

With me so far? OK. The next section will show you what page you’re on and how many pages you’ve created.

Click it, though, and you’ll get a handy-dandy Go to Page dialog that you can use to jump anywhere in your document.

Last is the gear icon. We’re very familiar with gear icons from all around Mac OS X, aren’t we? This one allows you to use the arrows next to it to scroll by different types of content, kind of like a search. 

So if you select Hyperlink from the gear icon’s list, for example, and then click the up and down arrows next to it, Pages’ll highlight every hyperlink in your document in turn.

Similarly, if you select something like Paragraph Style > Heading or Character Style > Underline, you can arrow through all the places you’ve used those styles. Which is pretty useful if you’ve got a long document with a lot of style mistakes you need to correct. 

Not that any of my TMO readers would have that problem, right? I have such faith in you.