I find the implementation of master pages or templates in PAGES suboptimal (this is a polite version of what I really think, but I reckon that swear words won’t help the cause).
I’m working on a document I generated myself just two years ago, presumably in Pages v10, it’s a letterhead with certain details that appear at the bottom of every pages. Please note, this is NOT done via a header/footer.
I’m aware about this really strange feature of Layout Mode vs WordProcessing mode. Almost worth a discussion on its own.
In no way can I currently access the before mentioned elements to apply required changes. Apple’s help is useless (it ONLY refers to PAGES v12, there’s no manual in Apple’s support for v11) , intensive googling only led to way outdated advice about much older versions of PAGES. I started with PAGES v11, hoped that updating to v12 would at least show me the commands Apple’s guide tells me about, but no luck.
I have v10, but as far as I can tell, the only differences between v10 and v12 are new features in the later version — except for one important terminology change that I will get to in a moment.
You mention that you are aware of the difference between Page Layout documents and Word Processing documents, but you don’t say which you are using. Master Pages only apply to Page Layouts. On the other hand, although Page Layout is certainly possible, I would think a letterhead is more likely, and more conveniently, a Word Processing template. (I am pretty sure all of the built-in letterhead templates are for Word Processing documents.) If your template is for a Word Processing document, then you don’t have a Master Page. Any references to Master Pages are irrelevant, and any commands related to them will be grayed out.
What you might have — and here is where the terminology change becomes important — in v10 were called Master Objects. Looking at the current online help files, it appears they have renamed this feature to (the probably less confusing term) Layout Objects. I don’t know which term is used in v11. It looks to me like nothing has changed except the name.
I will take a wild guess that you have a Word Processing template with Master Objects/Layout Objects. So, in v10 you would choose menu Arrange > Section Masters > Make Master Objects Selectable. In v12, that becomes Arrange > Section Layouts > Make Layout Objects Selectable.
@jajvj1 Many thanks for this marvellous piece of help. Very much appreciated.
It came down to the change of terminology. What was called Master Objects is now called Layout Objects. I’m not sure if this makes it any clearer, the change happened in v11.
Before asking here I had traveled through every single sensible menu option, to look under “Section Layouts” did however not seem to make any sense. The situation doesn’t get any easier when I search in Apple’s guide for any of the terms that potentially come close: “Layout objects”, “Master objects”, “Objects”, “Master” all end in " 0 results found in Pages User Guide for Mac". Actually, any search terms currently fails, searching the guide appears to be 100% broken.