Using Character Styles in Pages

Use Character Styles to style words throughout your document and then easily be able to change the style of all of these words at once. Character Styles can be applied to single words, characters, or groups of words.

Video Transcript: Let's talk about character styles in Pages. Unlike regular styles that will style the entire paragraph, character styles can style just a word, a single character, a bunch of words, anything you want. They're very handy because once you've assign a style you can change it throughout the document.
For instance, let's say we want to have a word that's going to have a certain style. Maybe it's going to be Bold, maybe it's going to use a different font, maybe it's even going to have a different color. Just like that. You can see here ignoring this style stuff at the top and just going down to character styles, you can see the character style assign is None with an asterisk which means that I've changed it from the basic none character style.
I can click on this and there's a few that are already filled in but I can hit the Plus button here and create my own. Let's just call it Special for special words. Now you can see that the character style for this word is Special. If I select another word you can see it's set to None. 
Now let's say that there's a few other words I want to style with exactly the same color, font, etc. So select that word there and change the style to Special. Let's do it with this word here as well. Special. And let's do a fourth one like that. Now the really cool thing about using Styles for this rather than applying it to each individual word is I can change them all at once. Here's how to do that.
Let's select one. Let's say I'm working here and I say, hmmm, that not quite right. I'm going to have it be green instead of red and maybe I'm going to make it italics as well as bold. Now this is different than those other ones and you can see I've got the asterisk here next to the word Special. I can click there and instead of creating a new style for that I can use the Update button.
The Update button will update the special character style to be green and italics and then will apply that to all of the text that I've previously made the Special style.  So I hit Update and notice it updates it for all of them there. 
So it's very easy and I can change my mind later on. This could be a five hundred page document with thousands of these words filled in. I can go in here and decide I want it to be purple and I want it to be this font instead. I can then go and say Update and they all update to have that font , that color, etc. 
So these character styles are very useful for  whenever you're going to have things styled throughout your document that you may want to change later on. Doing it individually would have been a big problem and taken lots of time. But because I was using a special character style I'm able to do it all instantly.

Comments: 3 Responses to “Using Character Styles in Pages”

Robert Hutwohl

7 years ago

Good demo, very useful. What is missing from Pages though, is the ability to find & replace a character or characters with a style. I know InDesign can do it and I think MS-Word can.

Peter Fulton Foss

Thank you!! Great little tutorial. Well spoken. Easy to understand. I have often wondered what Styles meant. You've just saved me a lot of time.

Kate Humphreys

I didn't know this. So useful for me. Thankyou

Comments Closed.

Using Character Styles in Pages

Comments: 3 Responses to “Using Character Styles in Pages”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information