How do I change the background of a page?

You cannot change the background colour of a page in Pages 3.0 or earlier. Neither can you set a texture or picture background.

If you want to change the background for the entire page, the work around is to follow the following steps

1. Insert a rectangle that covers the entire page.
2. In the Inspector, set the rectangle's Object Placement to "Fixed on Page".
3. Uncheck "Object causes wrap".
4. Go to the menu Arrange and Send to Back for the rectangle.

If you are happy with a different background colour for just part of the page you can try the following options:

• In the Font palette (⌘-T), set the background colour of the paragraph with the document icon. It does not change the colour for the whole page, and you cannot limit it to just part of a paragraph.
• Type using text boxes. You can set the background colour and background images using the Inspector.

Which formulas does Pages support?

The best source for that information is the free iWork '09 Formulas and Functions User Guide.

How do I enter a non breaking space?

Use alt + space instead of the space.

(This is used to keep words together, even if they go over a line break. You may for example have the phrase "R & D", which you for some reason wants to stay on the same line.)

How do I decide where a word is hyphenated at line breaks?

This is a missing feature in Pages.

Many applications use a soft hyphen or discretionary hyphen (unicode 00AD). That is an invisible character in the middle of a word, which only appears when the word needs to be broken into two in a line break.

Let's for example say you want to write an article about something called "efterår". You know the word, and you know that it can be broken into efter-år, if needed. A soft hyphen would be visible only when the word is broken.

Unfortunately, if you try with the soft hyphen 00AD in Pages, you will see that it is visible even when the word does not break: "efter-år".