Pages: ‘New’ command doesn’t remember last selected group of templates

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Pages
March 1st, 2005 • 1:45 am

Others have already noted that the available options in Pages when it comes to creating new documents are severely limited. There is just one option in the application’s “Preferences” dialog that lets you choose, for new documents, either to “Show Template Chooser dialog” or to automatically use a specific template by default.

There is nothing in between. In other words, if you define more than one custom template for Pages, then you are forced to select the first option (“Show Template Chooser dialog“). And the least that can be said is that this “Template Chooser” is not the most user-friendly feature in Pages.

All the templates are displayed with a preview picture, which makes for a very bulky list, and there’s usually a lot of scrolling to do to get to the template you want to use.

Fortunately, templates are also grouped by themes or categories of templates, including “Blank“, “Newsletters“, “Journals“, “Invitations“, “Stationery“, “Resumes“, “Education“, and “Marketing“.

And at the bottom of the list of themes, there is a group called “My Templates” which includes only the templates you have created. So you can avoid lots of scrolling by clicking on “My Templates” and then just selecting one of your templates, without having to go through all the existing templates that are included with Pages.

However, this particular aspect of the “Template Chooser” interface suffers from a very unfortunate flaw: it doesn’t remember anything from one use to the next. In other words, if you open the “Template Chooser” and select the “My Templates” group and then choose one of your templates, the next time you open the “Template Chooser“, it will not remember anything and will revert to the default “All” category that displays all available templates.

If the “Template Chooser” could remember the last selected group of templates, it would definitely help improve the user experience when it comes to selecting a template on which the next new document should be based.


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