How to Hide the Right Sidebar in Pages for Mac

The Pages app for Mac is a free and easy way to edit word documents on your Apple computer, but there is an annoying right side-bar that can get in the way of looking at two documents on screen at once. Here is how to hide the right sidebar in pages.

In Pages on OS X the right sidebar shows either Format or Setup, and it is handy if you need to quickly work with document formatting or setup options, but for most uses it gets in the way.

It is possible to hide the right sidebar, but it is not obvious where users need to click to hide it. Further complicating matters is the issue that you will need to click in a different spot depending which option is showing in the right sidebar in pages, even though sometimes it is blank.

Learn how to hide the right sidebar in Pages.

Learn how to hide the right sidebar in Pages.

Here’s how you can remove the right sidebar in Pages for Mac. This works on OS X Yosemite and OS X El Capitan.

With Pages active, click on Format or Document in the right sidebar. This will make one of them blue. Next click on View in the menu bar, Inspector and then Hide Inspector. This will hide the Format and Setup sidebar in Pages.

Hide Inspector to hide the right sidebar in Pages for OS X.

Hide Inspector to hide the right sidebar in Pages for OS X.

If you need to do this often or you need to unhide it and rehide it on a regular basis, the keyboard shortcut Option + Command + I will do the same thing without clicking into the menus over and over. To use a keyboard shortcut like this you need to press all of the keys at the same time.

In our tests Pages does not remember to hide the right sidebar, so you may find yourself doing this over and over again if you need to keep two documents side-by-side or you want to focus on what you are writing.

If you want fewer distractions on the screen you can also hide the toolbar at the top of pages by going to View -> Hide Toolbar or using the key combination Command + Option + T to hide it without clicking.

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