Although I made a career out of my ability to program computers, I’m not necessarily adept at some practical tasks involving them.

For example, I’ve been making a bunch of recipe files that I put on my iPad for when I want to bake a batch of brownies or whatever, but there’s been no consistency to the formats of the recipe files. I wanted to fix that.

I use the Apple Pages word processing app on my Mac, so I decided to create a Recipes template that I could use for all recipe files going forward, and eventually use it to update all the existing recipes that I already have. What I wanted was to try to make sure that each recipe would fit on one page, and one way to do that was to use a two column layout, where the ingredients were on the left column and the instructions were on the right. That should make it easy to refer back and forth, I thought.

But not easy to do for someone like me who rarely uses the Pages app.

Oh, I could make Pages do two columns easily enough, but what I wanted was a Title, centered at the top of the page and then the two columns below that. But each time I tried to format the page like that, it formatted the whole page like that, so the centered title ended up in the left column rather than centered at the top of the page.

Hmmm. Frustrating.

But happily a web search eventually gave me the secret sauce for getting what I wanted. All I had to do was 

1) format and center my title
2) then double space by hitting Return twice
3) then add the text that I wanted to be formatted in two columns
4) and finally select that text and tell Pages to format it into two columns—that would cause Pages to add a divider between the title and the two column text.

And that worked. Using those instructions I was able to create my Recipes template.

And with the template created, I took a well worn recipe and transformed it into the new format.

As I hate to view bright white backgrounds on computer screens, I also made sure that my template had a light gray background so all my recipes will be easier on my eyes in the future.

Now what I’ll be doing is using the template to format the recipes, then printing them to pdf files, then sending those pdf files to the iPad. Should have done this years ago.

And now that I have a Recipes template, I might experiment a bit with the typefaces and so forth.