Learn how to create your own custom invoice in Apple's Pages

Although the ready-made templates in Pages are stylish and beautifully designed, occasionally you may want to break away from the restrictions of using them and instead create your own bespoke design, particularly if you want something to accurately reflect the nature of your business. If you don’t feel confident designing something from scratch, have a look at some of the Apple templates or other examples, to get some inspiration and to get a rough idea of what you like and don’t like. You could even try sketching something out on paper first (something that many graphic designers still do). This tutorial will show you how to create an invoice from a blank page, using a little bit of originality and creativity combined with borrowing a little bit from a pre-made template and adapting it to suit your own design.

Step 1: Open and select

Open Pages and select a blank page. If you’re stuck for ideas, try scanning through the pre-made templates for inspiration.

Step 2: Drag and drop

Our invoice is for a photographer, so we want to make it more image led. Drag images from the media panel and drop them onto your template.

Step 3: Using guides

Use the blue guides to align images; drag the corner points to resize. You don’t need to hold the Shift key down as you might do in other software.

Step 4: Shapes

You can use the Shapes drop-down menu at the top of the interface to add graphic elements to your Pages template.

Step 5: Format

Use the Inspector palette or the format bar at the top of the interface to style your graphic elements, including colour, stroke and opacity.

Step 6: Adding text

Click on the Text box to add text. Type it in, then use the Fonts panel (indicated by the ‘A’ icon) or the format bar to style the text exactly as you want.

Step 7: Template Chooser

We’ll steal the data table from another template. In the File menu, select ‘New from Template Chooser’. Select an invoice that most suits your design.

Step 8: Select all

Once the chosen template has opened, go to the Edit drop-down menu and choose Select All or use the keyboard shortcut Command+A.

Step 9: Paste

Paste the text into your document by pressing Command+V. You can then style up the text using your chosen fonts.

Click on the image below to zoom in and view the annotations.