In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to use our Pages Automator Actions to create a PDF exporting droplet for Apple’s Pages word processing app. If you want to follow along, you’ll need a copy of Pages, Automator (in the apps folder of all fairly recent Macs) and a copy of Pages Automator Actions.

If you’ve not used Pages Automator Actions before, you’ll need to open it from your Applications folder so it can add its actions to Automator. Once you’ve done that, you can close it and you’ll never need to open it again.

Create a new app

Open Automator (you’ll find it in your Applications folder), create a new document and select “Application” in the menu that appears.

Add the actions

Select “Pages” from the left hand section of the window and drag the actions in as shown in the screen shot below. Note that “All documents” is selected in all of them – don’t forget that!

The first action will make our app open any of the documents dropped on it in Pages. The second will export all open documents as PDF files. The PDFs will be in the same location as the Pages files used to create them – with a .pdf file extension, of course!

Save your app

Save the app somewhere you’ll be able to find it, e.g. your desktop. Make sure the File Format is set to “Application”. Once you’ve saved your app, you will be able to drop one or more PDFs on it and they’ll be automatically turned into PDFs!

Note: There was a bug in some earlier versions of Pages which might have given a permissions related error when doing this. If you have errors, make sure you’re running the latest version of Pages.

And there’s more…

Automator actions for Pages has actions for exporting PDFs, Word, RTF and more handy actions to help you create cool apps, workflows and services.

Why not get your copy today and start automating Pages the easy way, for only $14.99*

* or near local currency equivalent