Apple today released updates for its suite of iWork apps on iOS and Mac, introducing new features for Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. All of the apps have access to a new library that includes more than 500 professionally drawn shapes, and there's a new feature that allows users to reply to comments and join threaded conversations.

Apple is also introducing new auto-correction and text replacement options that are designed to save users time when typing, and these new features are available in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers across both iOS and Mac.

iwork for mac
Pages for iOS and Mac now support linked text boxes, and there's a feature allowing users to export documents as fixed layout ePub books. When collaborating with other users on a document, there are new options for changing margins, headers, footers, and paper size in both apps, and in Pages for iOS specifically, there's a new page thumbnail view for better navigation.

In Pages for Mac, Stock and Currency functions will now return data from the previous market day's close.

The same Stock and Currency update is coming to Keynote for Mac, and there's also a new option to edit notes while displaying slides in Light Table view. Also new to the Mac version of Keynote are new pan and zoom options. Light Table view is expanding to Keynote for iOS, and there's an option to edit presenter notes when viewing slides.

Both versions of Numbers are being updated with support for print preview when working on collaborative spreadsheets, and the Insert Stock Quote feature and the Stock and Currency functions now use data from the previous market day's close.

All of Apple's iWork apps are available from the iOS App Store and Mac App Store for free. The apps have been fully free for download since April of 2017.

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

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

Top Rated Comments

tethead Avatar
109 months ago
OMG, they actually added back in linked text boxes!! Their removal of this feature with the "new" iWork suite several years ago caused me to stop using these for work - and now we're happy with another solution - but at least I can finally open and edit my older documents. I wonder if all my feedback submitted on that finally got read??
Score: 14 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Brutonus Avatar
109 months ago
I never used Pages '09, what are linked text boxes actually?
They allow you to link two separate text boxes, so when text does not fit in the first, it overflows in the next. It's all explained on this new help document on Apple: https://support.apple.com/nl-be/HT207731
Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)
DanielDD Avatar
109 months ago
Is there actually an advantage to using this applications when Office seems so much more superior?

I'm not trying to be a jerk or anything I'm sincerely curious as to what the benefit would be to using them vs office.
Pages is miles ahead of Word in:
- Responsiveness
- Font rendering
- Making tables
- Graphic heavy documents
- Generating equations (since last update)

Add that to a simpler user interface, and Pages becomes a really good app.
Score: 9 Votes (Like | Disagree)
HobeSoundDarryl Avatar
109 months ago
Wait.... Apple's word processor didn't let you type directly on the page?

o_O
More accurately, Pages '09 was basically 2 programs in one:

* a "skinny" Word Processor
* a "skinny" DTP (Page Layout) Program

The Word Processor side worked pretty similar to how Pages has worked in the last few years (and yes, you could just type into a page).

The DTP side gave people who wanted to make something that looked like magazines, fancy newsletters, etc extraordinarily good control over where text could be placed... and flowed page to page. It seemed to have many of the best features of "fat" DTP software via a relatively easy-to-use Apple UI.

When Apple decided to feature-sync Pages between Macs & iDevices, the DTP side features that separated it from being "just a word processor" were many of the popular features that were dropped. And this one- linked text boxes- was one of the biggies that was dropped. Glad to see it's finally come back again. I hope it works as well as it did 8 years ago.

Many of the gripes about missing Pages '09 revolve around missing the DTP-side features of Pages '09. It was a really good "skinny" DTP program (and still is).
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
saqibhasan Avatar
109 months ago
Is there actually an advantage to using this applications when Office seems so much more superior?

I'm not trying to be a jerk or anything I'm sincerely curious as to what the benefit would be to using them vs office.
I hate word. How does backspace suddenly change the font, the font size, color and paragraph justification for the text BEYOND the cursor?!?!

Move a text box by 5 pixels and it shifts four pages down, inside out and upside down.

Grrrrrrrr.
Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)
jamescobalt Avatar
109 months ago
Is there actually an advantage to using this applications when Office seems so much more superior?
I've developed nearly a hundred presentations in a professional capacity (not as in, I made presentations for meetings at work like everyone does but as the actual end product at a marketing agency) in both Keynote and Powerpoint and find Keynote is much faster to work in than PowerPoint - the fact you can work with vectors is huge, and the application rarely gets bogged down when working with huge files. PowerPoint does have some awesome features I'd love to see come to Keynote, but it still takes significantly longer to get the same quality output.

Numbers has nothing on Excel for flexibility and depth, and the same is true for Pages on Word outside of desktop publishing ...but Microsoft has Publisher which is more powerful for desktop publishing too. In that case - do you want a simple tool that does a little of both, or two separate tools that are more complicated but do much more? Are you working on a brochure/one-off item? Or is it a monthly 125 page magazine? (not that you'd use Microsoft Publisher for professional magazine work either!)

And of course, are you more comfortable with Apple's UX approach or Microsoft's UX approach? You can click between a dozen panes till your fingers are sore, or handle more ribbons than a rhythmic gymnastic competition. Pick your poison.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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