Apple says its iWork productivity apps for iOS should play better with the Mac version of the apps and with Microsoft Office, thanks to a key update to the apps on Tuesday. Easy compatibility between these apps with their Office analogs is important to business users, many of whom rely heavily on the Microsoft productivity toolset.
Keynote, Numbers and Pages, which are Apple’s house-made apps for presentations, spreadsheets and word processing, should share documents better with the update thanks to increased compatibility.
Keynote now has better support for PowerPoint and Keynote for Mac slide sizes and more themes (Apple maintains iWork apps for Mac and iOS as separate products). Pages — to many users’ relief — finally gets the ability to track changes, and to accept and reject those changes while editing. Numbers, meanwhile, now lets users hide or unhide rows or columns in spreadsheets and preserve rich text when importing tables to the app.
Each iWork app can be updated in the respective iOS and Mac App Stores. The updates are free if you already own the apps, but are on the pricey side if you want to buy them new: $ 10 a pop on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Mac versions of the apps are $ 20 apiece.
Previous coverage:
Review of using iWork to sync Documents in the Cloud
Review of iWork apps optimized for Retina displays
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