Laying Out a Proposal

You'll often need to pull project ideas, company information, and budgets into a proposal. The task of laying out a proposal is well suited to Pages. In fact, Pages gives you several proposal templates (or templates that will work) in the Template Chooser:

• Business > Project Proposal

• Creative > Creative Proposal

• Marketing > Program

• Marketing > Datasheet

• Marketing > White Paper

You'll work with the Creative Proposal template here.

Note

The art of writing a good proposal is beyond the scope of this book, but you can browse the business section of a bookstore to find ideas and sample proposals.

1.	Continue working in Pages (or launch it if you quit the program).
2.	If it's not visible, open the Template Chooser by selecting File > New. Choose the Creative category, select the Creative Proposal, and click Choose. A new untitled document based on the template opens. Note Pages automatically inserts your personal contact information into the appropriate fields on the page. It obtains this information from the database maintained by the Address Book application included with Mac OS X.
3.	Select the personal name placeholder text and press the Delete key.
4.	Into the position where the name used to appear, drag a company logo. You can use the file RPLogo.tif from the Lesson 10 folder.
5.	Repeat the addition of the logo to the header on page 2.
6.	Continue adding pages as needed by clicking the Pages button in the toolbar.
7.	Continue practicing with the template, adding photos if you want. Here are some tips for using Pages for your proposals: The executive summary page can serve as both a summary and an outline for your presentation. You can create a short version as a summary and then use the headers on the page as an outline for your proposal. The budget template is all set up with tables and calculations. Just change the quantity or unit price to calculate the project budget. A schedule is important in your proposal. Changes in delivery time are among the key factors that determine project costs and success. Be sure to add a contact information page at the end of your proposal so people can get in touch.
8.	When you're finished, you can save the document for future use or close it without saving. This exercise will be much more meaningful if you put the template into action and use it for your next project proposal.

Tip

If you customize a proposal a lot, consider saving it as a template (File > Save Template). It's also a good idea to keep old proposals for reference and source images.