Of all the obscure features locked into Microsoft Word, one of the least used is undoubtedly its ability to add a rather wide variety of decorative borders to documents that you're working with. Unfortunately, that's one area where Apple apparently decided its Pages program didn't need to have feature parity, so there's no real way to add borders within the program itself.

However, there is a way to hack it.

The basic idea is that you can put any graphic into the background on a page, so if the background happens to be a decorative, festive or even serious border, then you're good to go. It might not be quite so easy to have a "certificate" look, but that can be done with a scalable graphic from another source anyway.

To demonstrate, I'm just going to use the shapes included in Pages.

Let's have a look!

We'll start with a blank page that just has some writing centered and in bold:

Pretty boring, really, but it's a starting point.

To proceed, click on the "Shapes" button along the top of the toolbar and you'll see all sorts of different graphical objects you can add to the document:

I like the "square talking balloon" so that's what I pick.

It instantly appears in the middle of my text (based on the cursor insertion point) causing all sorts of ruckus:

Clearly we need to push the graphic into the background. To do that, open up the Inspector window and choose the object placement section (third from the left). Note the different options in the top area:

For this graphical object to be "behind" the text, you need to switch from "floating" to "in background", so do so by clicking on the button adjacent. Big change, quick:

Now just grab the handles on the graphic and size and locate it so that it completely encompasses the text on the page. It's easy:

So that's definitely a fun visual effect for a Pages document, but what about that border we need to include?

To turn a shape into a border, the easiest solution is to go back to the Inspector window, but this time go to the graphic section and make a few tweaks:

As you can see, I've set "Fill" to "none" (which gets rid of the solid green), then I've tweaked the "Line" setting to be a ragged line style, dark blue, and 7pt thick, considerably more than the default for this shape.

The result:

Again, a fun visual effect. But it's not a border. Then again, it's awful close. Instead, experiment with using the square and rounded-edge square shapes, no fill, thicker lines, and various colors.

It just took me a few seconds to make this festive triple-border:

That should inspire you to get some borders and other graphical objects showing up on your next Pages document. And good luck with your school report!