Options in Pages include colored text and adding images.

What the heck are you looking at (photo at right)??? Blue text and images? You’re asking, “How did he do that?”

I use Pages to create all the Lahaina News articles, and it starts off on a blank white page.

But what if I want to change the text color to light blue, or maybe place a photo in the background?

Ready to try it out? First open up Pages, choose a blank document, click on View on the top screen, choose Layout. Now don’t freak out looking at all the square boxes that just appeared.

Take your mouse and click on Format at the very top right of the page, then place your mouse in the very top of the page (above the long boxes) and click. All of a sudden, a new menu appears called BACKGROUND and a box below that says NO FILL.

Well, if you got that far, get ready to have some fun.

Go ahead and click in the box NO FILL – all kinds of options appear. You have Color, Gradient Advance and Image fill. Knock yourself out and click on Color above the boxes, then choose the color wheel for any color.

Just remember that if you lose the Background screen and the Body screen appears, just click your mouse on the very top of the page above the long boxes to return to the Background Menu.

Now if you want to return to a white page, just click on the up and down arrow keys and choose NO FILL. To return to the menu again, click on the very top of the page. See the photo? Cool, yeah?!

Most people use Microsoft Word or Pages to create Documents, but did you know that you can use Text Edit and do almost the same – but without all the whistles and bells?

You can open up a Word document in Text Edit, make changes and save it as a DOC or DOCX file. But get this you can drag a picture and even a small video clip into a Text Edit document, then save it and send it to another person who will open it up and see the video or pictures.

Get ready for a new feature Apple is going to offer. Instead of downloading a new app, you can look at parts of the app and then decide to download it if you like it.

Here is a great trick to remember. If you were typing something on your iPhone in the Notes App and deleted a word or paragraph, all you have to do is tap three fingers and click on “Undo” at the top, and it comes back.

Another trick is when you close Safari with a website still opened (by clicking on the red box on the top left), it will open up to the same page when your reopen the program.

To prevent this, try clicking on the Apple icon on the top left of the screen; choose System Preferences, General and click on “Close Windows when quitting an app.” This will close the web page permanently, and when opening up Safari, it won’t appear again.

A lot of people get confused on how to really quit an app. So, I’ll show you a few ways.

Let’s start out opening up Safari. If you click on the red button on the top left of Safari, the page disappears, but the word Safari still shows at the top. Well, you just closed the page but didn’t quit Safari.

To really shut down Safari, click on Safari at the top and choose “Quit Safari” in the drop down menu.

Send your computer-related questions to MauiMist@aol.com.