How to Do an Outline in iMac Pages

By Julius Vandersteen

Updated February 10, 2017

Use the Pages application on your iMac to make an outlined document.
i Justin Sullivan/Getty Images News/Getty Images

When you need to organize your writing in outline form on your Mac, you can use Apple’s Pages application, part of the iWork applications suite that includes Keynote, a presentation application, and Numbers, a spreadsheet program. For example, you need to write a paper at school, or present a report at your job. Pages comes with a number of outline templates, which you use to as the basis to make an outlined document. You can also create an outline from a blank document.

Outline from Template

Launch Pages on your iMac. Click “File” from the Pages menu, and then click “New from Template Chooser”. The “Template Chooser” window appears.

Click “Outlines” below “Word Processing” in the left pane of the Template Chooser window. Thumbnail images of various Outline templates appear.

Click an Outline template, such as “Basic Outline”, “Research Outline” or “Classic Outline” to select it. Click “Choose” to create a new document based on the chosen outline template, with the title, headings and text pre-formatted with placeholder copy and bullet points.

Click “File” from the Pages menu, and then click “Save”. A dialog box opens. Type a name for your outline, then click a folder on your iMac where you want to store it, and then click “Save”.

Click “Title” in the Pages window, and then type the text you want to use for the document’s title. Click “Heading 1” and then type text for your first heading. Click the paragraph below “Heading 1” and type the text you want to use. Continue in this fashion, typing in different headings and their paragraphs.

Outline from Scratch

Click “New” from the Pages menu. Click “New” from the Pages menu. The “Template Chooser” window appears.

Click “Blank” under “Word Processing” ” in the left pane of the Template Chooser window. Click “Choose” to create a new blank document.

Click “Outline” from the Pages menu, and then begin typing. The text is automatically formatted in the “Heading 1” style with a bullet point. Press the “Return” key on the iMac’s keyboard to start a new heading, and type text for it.

Press the “Tab” key on the iMac’s keyboard to create a bulleted sub-topic, and type text for it. Press the “Return” key to create another sub-topic. Press the “Tab” key again to indent sub-topics with smaller heading type style.

Write some text and then double-click it to select the words. Click the style pull-down menu in the menu bar at the top of the application window, and then click a style to apply to the text, such as “Heading 1” or “Body”.

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