Apple's iWork for iOS Apps Updated With Real-Time Collaboration

Apple today updated its iWork line of apps, including Pages, Keynote, and Numbers, for iOS 10. The new versions of the apps include a real-time collaboration feature, which is available as a beta.

With real-time collaboration, first announced on September 7, multiple users can edit an iWork document at one time using a Mac, an iOS device, or iCloud.com. Real-time collaboration allows all users to see what each person is doing inside the document, with multiple cursors and a list of document editors.

iworkiosapp

Also included in today's update is a new formatting pane designed for the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, support for wide color gamut (a feature coming in the iPhone 7), improved downloading, and enhanced keyboard navigation and keyboard shortcuts.

What's New in Version 3.0
- Real-time collaboration (feature in beta)
- Edit a document with others at the same time in Pages on Mac, iPad, iPhone, and iCloud.com
- Share your document publicly or with specific people
- See who else is in a document
- See participants' cursors as they're editing

- A new format pane takes advantage of the display on the 12.9-inch iPad Pro
- Improved downloading - Pages now downloads documents from iCloud only when you're ready to work on them
- Wide color gamut image support
- Enhanced keyboard navigation and additional keyboard shortcuts

In Keynote, there's an option to present a slideshow that users can follow along with from their Mac, iPhone, iPad, or iCloud.com, and there's a feature for highlighting with the Apple Pencil while presenting on the iPad Pro. Pages and Keynote also both feature support for opening and editing Pages and Keynote '05 documents.

Apple's line of iWork apps are free to users who have recently purchased a new Mac or iOS device. Otherwise, each iWork app for Mac is available for $19.99 while each iWork app for iOS is available for $9.99.

Pages for iOS - [App Store]
Keynote for iOS - [App Store]
Numbers for iOS - [App Store]

Top Rated Comments

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2457282

34 months ago

What features is it missing? I ditched Office a long time ago.

Keynote is far superior to PowerPoint. Pages and Numbers seem about par with Word and Excel - each has some features that its counterparts lacks, and none of those features are really deal-breakers.

Keynote - I agree
Numbers - No pivot tables is my biggest gripe (most of my accounting spreadsheets have them so I cannot move off Excel)
Pages - Missing Table of Content and Footnotes as my biggest gripes (My wife doing her Master's thesis means she is stuck with Word)

Rating: 4 Votes

jonsmith2000

34 months ago

Maybe its time to revisit pages my friend. Both footnotes and table of contents are found under insert.

Rating: 3 Votes

Richardgm

34 months ago

I dumped iWork for Office.

Rating: 3 Votes

arefbe

34 months ago

Evidently only available if you're on iOS 10. Not quite ready to do that just yet! :)

Rating: 2 Votes

mr.bee

34 months ago

Do you need compatibility with Excel's pivot tables, or you just need a summary of other tables' data? I find using SUMIFS or COUNTIFS in a separate table even more flexible than pivot tables.

As for Table of Content and Footnotes (or Endnotes), they are there in my copy of Pages.

Paolo
[doublepost=1473867425][/doublepost]
I find Numbers very slow, and not suitable for large amount of data. It works great, however, for personal use or small businesses (that is, I guess, most of us).

Paolo

SUMIFS and COUNTIFS are great if you know your data.
Pivot is one of the easiest ways for data exploration. "Which vendors are in my data list, which dimensions are used..." one pivot and immediately you see which and you can easily summarise per row/column.

If you really know your data structure and data means, then SUMIFS and COUNTIFS are great, more flexible and even better then pivot.

Numbers can handle 'large' amount of data if you open it as a csv file and don't start 'working' in the data but just create reports based on that date, with sumifs and countifs. If you start to do vlookups in large amount of data then you're screwed :D

Rating: 1 Votes

mr.bee

34 months ago

Wait toc is there in pages right? Basic, but there...

I'd say
Numbers - Pivot! yes, or something that shows up all unique values automatically, the rest I can manage
Numbers - link to databases, or let a 3rd party develop it
Numbers - find and replace only works for the entire document, not for a selection
Numbers - some basic data cleaning tool
Numbers - better print management, can't move a table in page/ print view
Pages - page setup per section. Can't even turn just one page landscape! Isn't anyone annoyed by this?

Then comes collaboration!

Rating: 1 Votes

BWhaler

34 months ago

I love iWork. Even for all its missing features, I love it and am always excited to get an update hoping the update is a major update.

I really hope Apple fills in the functionality gaps in both Mac and iOS versions. I think it's strategically important for Apple to have a strong Office product and cloud offering.

Rating: 1 Votes

NapoleonIV

34 months ago

to my surprise I just went in and saw that the features in there on my Mac. Need to see if they are also on the iPad. When did they bring back these features?

They were never gone, the problem was that they were so poorly implemented that they barely worked, and worse, if you started a document in Pages 4, the formatting of the table of contents would be ruined when the document was updated to work with Pages 5. Also, if I remember correctly, the linking of the of the chapter titles to the actual pages they represented was also broken. This was one of the reasons I didn’t abandon Pages 4 until last year.

Rating: 1 Votes

AJ5790

34 months ago

Numbers really doesn't work as well as excel in a medium to large sized business use case.

Rating: 1 Votes