I’ve been annoyed for quite awhile by the right side panel displayed on the latest versions of Mac OS Pages, the annoying thing being figuring out how to make it go away when you want. It’s useful when you need it, for font, formatting, alignment, and such. But when just typing I find it distracting. It’s not obvious how to make it go away, though, and until today I’ve just passively elected to live with its mildly irritating presence because figuring out how to get rid of it was just a little too much effort.
Today, though, I decided to look for the switch to make it go away. I figured I’d be looking for a menu item or button called “sidebar” or “format bar” or something like that but no such item seemed available. So, as one does with a program like MSW when finally fed up with it I went through each menu item one by one, regardless of whether it seemed logical. By this brute force method I found the answer.
This sidebar is known as The Inspector. I’m not kidding, The Inspector.
Once you know its secret, utterly counter-intuitive name (they might as well have named it The Brigadier, or the Baker, or the Guy from the Gas Company) you can hide it.
I love Pages and prefer it in every way to MSW. But that ain’t Maclike. It ain’t even Windows-like. It’s stupid-like.