Sara France majored in Business Management, and always had her eye on running a business of her own. But she never suspected that her eye would become her business — until fate intervened. “I was working as a part-time photographer’s assistant between sales jobs,” she recalls. “And one day, at a wedding gig, the photographer handed me a camera and told me to start shooting. The next day she called me and said, ‘Your pictures are amazing. You have to do this for a living.’”

Today, San Diego-based Sara France Photography is a fast-growing wedding and portraiture studio, with a client list that ranges from Hawaii to New York and a reputation that has spread primarily by word of mouth. Sara is also in demand as a technology evangelist within the photography community. She built both aspects of her business by using Apple iWork, which includes Pages for creating beautiful documents and publications, and Keynote for creating cinema-quality presentations.

One Tool, Many Uses

“The beauty of Pages is its flexibility,” says Sara. “First, it’s an extremely efficient word processor — with all the features I need to run my business, yet none of the typical complexity. At the same time, it’s powerful design software, with templates that give me a fantastic starting point for creating and marketing my own brand — and making it stick in people’s minds.”

As an administrative tool, she says, “All the documents we create with Pages — contracts, correspondence, receipts — are set up with data fields for the customer information I keep in my Address Book.

The drag-and-drop ease of Pages’ Mail Merge is just huge for us. Not only names and contacts, but wedding dates, locations, and the details of the service package they’ve ordered. So I can just drag the contact over any document, and it automatically populates the fields with the client’s information. This ensures that all our crucial customer information stays up to date and in one place, and we never have to duplicate work when we create documentation.