Can't figure out how to enclose text in a rectangle, as I used to do in Word... any ideas?!

The feature you're looking for is called "text boxes" in Pages. You can access it by clicking on INSERT, TEXT BOX. For more information about creating borders, applying fill colors, etc, to highlight your text box, click on HELP, PAGES HELP, ADDING TEXT, USING TEXT BOXES AND SHAPES TO HIGHLIGHT TEXT. (Pages '09)

Hope that gets you started.

I pays to have a look around, both the menus and the Inspectors in Pages are quite well organised working from the large down to the small.

Inspector > Text > Text > Text Inset

You may also have been looking for a border around paragraphs:

Inspector > Text > More > Borders and Rules

Peter

Gary,

Text Boxes and Shapes are two different types of Pages Objects. You may change the outline of a Shape, but a Text Box will always be a rectangle. You can put text inside a Shape, so perhaps that's where you should have begun.

Jerry

Like this?

Jerry

Pages doesn't let you separately set border offsets, Indesign is the only application I know that can do that.

You can get the effect with margin insets inside a Text box or offsets inside a Border.

Inside both the Textbox and Border move the margins of the Text inside to have the Text where you want it relative to the border/stroke.

When looking for a solution there is usually more than one way to look at the problem itself.

Peter

Gary,

Entering a negative value for the Offset will bring the right and left borders in tighter. Unfortunately it also brings the top and bottom borders in, but you can push those back by selecting a blank space in the top (or bottom)

line and adjusting the Baseline shift up (or down).

To add to my last note, if you insert layout breaks before and after the paragraph in question, you can use the Layout margins to adjust the left and right borders independently.

Inspector > Layout > Layout > Layout Margins

Walt