Do you send out annual updates about your family around the holiday season? If so, MacWorld has written a good article about how to create a newsletter using Pages. Pages is Apple’s word processor which competes with Microsoft Word. It comes bundled with some Macs, so you may already have a copy. If not, you can buy it as part of iWork. Or, if you have Mac OS X 10.6.6 or higher on your Mac, you can use the App Store to buy it stand-alone for about $20. I used the MacWorld article as a guide to design our holiday newsletter this year. Here’s a brief overview.

[Update October 2014: Apple now ships iWork (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) free with all new Macs, iPads, and iPhones.]

Start by opening iPhoto and identifying which photos you want to include in your newsletter. I found it easiest to put my photos into an album so I would be able to find them again easily when using Pages.

Next, I opened Pages and selected the “Informal Newsletter” template. I clicked on the Media button in Pages’ toolbar. I clicked on Photos and selected the iPhoto Album containing my selected photos. I then dragged the images on top of the placeholder images that appear in the template.

I clicked on the text box on the first page, selected all of the text and deleted it. Then I typed in our content.

We wanted to add a second page so I went to the Insert menu, selected Pages and added a “Back Page” since it has pre-defined locations for text and photos. I linked the text boxes on page 1 and page 2 so the text would automatically flow between them. I replaced the placeholder photos, of course, as well.

Finally, I realized that I needed more room to fit all of the text so I had to adjust the template’s layout some. I removed one of the photos on page 1 and added a new text box then linked it to the other box on page 1. After that, I changed the font and font size a bit to get everything to fit. Finally, I was satisfied with the layout. Pages is a pretty elegant program to use for tasks like this and the templates are really professional, so it made this task easy to do.