Making a College Paper with Apple Pages

Apple Pages is a powerful word processor which is available free for every recent Apple computer. (Sorry, Windows folks—you can’t use it.) If you don’t see it in your Dock, look for it in the Applications menu. If you don’t see it there, go to the Apple menu  in the upper left and look for it in App Store…

Getting Started

Apple provides templates for academic papers, but they leave a bit to be desired, particularly the APA template. Click these links for a couple of better choices.

How to use the templates:

  1. Click the link. The template will land in your “Downloads” folder.
  2. Go to your “Downloads” folder and double-click the template. You will be offered three choices:
  3. If you choose “Add to Template Chooser,” your copy of Pages will get a new template, filed under “My Templates,” and you can use it whenever you begin a new document. If you choose “New Document,” you can begin a new project, but your copy of Pages will not be changed. If you choose “Cancel,” the computer abandons the whole thing.

Writing the Paper

Once you begin a new document (whether directly from your Downloads folder or from the list of templates in Pages), the document opens with the name “Untitled.” The first thing you should do is save it (⌘ + S) with a new name. Try to come up with a file name that will help you find it quickly in the future. While you are at it, come up with a good place to put it too. If all of your files are on your desktop with generic names, you will take a long time trying to find the one you were working on most recently.

Now that your file is open and saved with its new name, you can begin typing. Each element of the template has its own paragraph style to govern such things as typeface and spacing. Simply triple-click each part of the template to highlight it and type in your own information. If you are typing a paragraph which uses the Body, Quotation, or Bibliography paragraph style and press the <Return> key, the next paragraph will use the same style.

Managing the Paragraph Styles

If you need to assign a different style to a paragraph, it’s easy to do. Click anywhere in the paragraph. A grey “Text” menu should open on the right. A drop-down menu will appear with the name of the paragraph style currently assigned. Drop the menu down to the see the available options and click the one you want. Here are the elements of the template and the styles currently assigned:

APA Template

MLA Template

Downloading Your Paper for Blackboard or Printing

You should not submit a Pages document to Blackboard (if your instructor doesn’t have an Apple computer, your paper won’t get read), and our Writing Center doesn’t have Apple computers, so if you want to submit through Blackboard or print your copy for peer editing, you need one more step:

  1. Click File in the upper left corner of your screen.
  2. In the drop-down menu, click Export to >
  3. In the pop-out menu, click Word…
  4. In the next menu, do not click “Require password to open.” Click  Next… 
  5. In the next menu, assuming you have specified a smarter name than “Untitled,” the “Save As” window should show the right name. I suggest you drop the “Where” menu down to “Downloads.” Click the  Export  button.
  6. Your file will land in the “Downloads” folder.

The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.

The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by Ashland University.

Revised 12/23/22 • Page author: Curtis Allen • e-mail: callen@ashland.edu.