Highlighting Text & Auto Text Options

Question

I've recently migrated from MS Word to Pages, and I'm determined to make this new relationship work. In Word I used its highlighting text (as with a real highlighter--yellow, pink, etc.) feature, as well as its Auto Text feature, in which I had a number of prescribed, hyperlinked comments. (I'm a teacher, and I would auto text things like, "comma error," which would then be linked to a web page about comma errors.
Can anyone help me discover ways to do both of these in Pages? Also, is there anything for Pages like MS Word's macros?
Thanks in advance,
Brad Carpenter

Answer 1

Welcome to the forums, Brad.
There is no direct analogue in Pages to Word's highlighting feature. However, you can use the Comments feature to add specific comments to a specific piece of text (with the advantage that the comments can be easily hidden, since you are not changing the characteristics of the actual text). Simply select a bit of text and click the Comment icon in the toolbar, or from the Insert menu select "Comment". The selected text will highlight in document, and a comments box will appear to the left of the page, in which you can type whatever you want. In the comments box you can select whatever text you want and make it a hyperlink, by going to the Hyperlink Inspector. Unfortunately, there is not an easy way to automate the creation of a hyperlink, at least as far as I know.
There are plenty of third-party applications that will let you store and add snippets of text easily to any Mac document, including Pages. These include TypeIt4Me, Butler, and even Quicksilver, which has a fanatical following and may be more than you need for this kind of task. I'm sure others here might be able to suggest other apps.
One caution, however: If you intend to be sharing documents with others, they must be using Pages themselves to take advantage of these features. Unless your students are also using Pages, these workarounds won't really help.