Apple updates iWork for Mac, iOS, and iCloud

Apple updated its iWork suite on all three platforms (iOS, Mac, and iCloud) yesterday, with improvements to almost every aspect of every app, from editing in Pages to creating charts in Numbers and delivering presentations in Keynote.

All three apps will purportedly be more compatible with Microsoft Office (which, coincidentally, finally appeared on the iPad last week). On the Mac, the three iWork apps now aim to do a better job of exporting to Office’s XML formats. The iCloud versions of the three apps can now open password-protected documents, spreadsheets, and presentations from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. And the Mac and iOS apps claim to preserve custom number formats in charts imported from their Office counterparts.

The new versions are also designed to make sharing documents easier. For example, there’s a new “view-only” option that you can use when you share documents but don’t want viewers to edit anything. The iOS and Mac versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote can share password-protected documents via an iCloud link. The iCloud versions of the three apps can show you a list of the documents that other users have shared with you in the document manager; they also let you add passwords to documents you create online.

The iCloud apps add some other new collaboration tools, too. You can view a list of the collaborators who are currently in a given document. You can also see the cursors and selections of everyone who’s working on a document. To go to wherever a given collaborator is currently editing a document, you can click on his or her name in the collaborator list. And if they move an image and shape, those movements are animated.

The iCloud apps also get support for Retina displays, and you can now use folders to organize online documents in those versions of Pages and Numbers. On the Mac, there’s improved support for AppleScript. Keynote for both Mac and iOS get a bunch of new build animations and new transitions.

There’s plenty more, all of it detailed on the product pages for Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. And, if you’re counting, the new Mac versions are Pages 6.2, Numbers 3.2, and Keynote 6.2; on iOS, it’s version 2.2 of all three.